The Intel Xeon 5670: Six Improved Cores
by Johan De Gelas on March 16, 2010 3:39 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Benchmark configuration
First of all, I like to offer my thanks to my colleague Tijl Deneut who helped me out with the complex virtualization benchmarks.
None of our benchmarks required more than 20 GB of RAM. Database files were placed on a three drive RAID0 Intel X25-E SLC 32GB SSD, with log files on one Intel X25-E SLC 32GB. Adding more drives improved performance by only 1%, so we are confident that storage is not our bottleneck.
Important note: We threw in our older results of the “Expensive Quad Sockets vs. Ubiquitous Dual Sockets” article. We are well aware that a quad Opteron system is not the natural competitor for a dual Xeon X5670 CPU setup. However, the performance of the quad socket AMD systems should give us a very rough estimate where the new octal core and twelve core Magny Cours Opterons will land. So we reused our 4 month older benchmarks to get an idea what Magny Cours is capable off.
Xeon Server 1: ASUS RS700-E6/RS4 barebone
Dual Intel Xeon "Gainestown" X5570 2.93GHz, Dual Intel Xeon “Westmere” X5670 2.93 GHz
ASUS Z8PS-D12-1U
6x4GB (24GB) ECC Registered DDR3-1333
NIC: Intel 82574L PCI-EGBit LAN
PSU: Delta Electronics DPS-770 AB 770W
Opteron Server 1 (Quad CPU): Supermicro 818TQ+ 1000
Quad AMD Opteron 8435 at 2.6GHz
Quad AMD Opteron 8389 at 2.9GHz
Supermicro H8QMi-2+
64GB (16x4GB) DDR2-800
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
PSU: Supermicro 1000W w/PFC (Model PWS-1K01-1R)
Opteron Server 2 (Dual CPU): Supermicro A+ Server 1021M-UR+V
Dual Opteron 2435 "Istanbul" 2.6GHz
Dual Opteron 2389 2.9GHz
Supermicro H8DMU+
32GB (8x4GB) DDR2 800
PSU: 650W Cold Watt HE Power Solutions CWA2-0650-10-SM01-1
vApus/Oracle Calling Circle Client Configuration
First client (Tile one)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83 GHz
Foxconn P35AX-S
GB (2x2GB) Kingston DDR2-667
NIC: Intel PRO/1000
Second client (Tile two)
Single Xeon X3470 2.93GHz
S3420GPLC
Intel 3420 chipset
8GB (4 x 2GB) 1066MHz DDR3
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
40 Comments
View All Comments
behrouz - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
why did you not test magny core ?JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
For the same reason that there are no Magny-Cours benchmarks on AMD's site yet :-).drewintheav - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
The INTEL i7 980X has dual QPI's and will run in a dual socket mainboard!!! Such as the EVGA W555 /Classified SR-2Lukas - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
No, i7 980X has only a single QPI link. But i'm pretty sure there's a corresponding W56xx CPU, with two QPI links and twice the price tag.thunng8 - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
"server CPU architecture which already has the fastest cores on the market and you’ll get very impressive results"This is not entirely correct. If you limit your self to x64 architecture, it is correct, but the recently released IBM POWER7 8 core chip blows away the Nehalem architecture in the benchmarks released so far.
For example, a 4 chip, 32 core 3.55Ghz POWER7 server does 85,220 SAPS in the SAP SD 2 tier benchmark and that isn't even the top bin POWER7. (top bin is 3.86Ghz with double the memory bandwidth / core) There are even larger margins in other benchmarks like specIntRate etc.
Photubias - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Just curious: what software (OS/applications) run on that 8Core POWER7 chip?Lukas - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Linux, AIX, IBM i, z/OSThat's pretty much it. Lot's of traditional OLTP workloads run on those platforms. Several flight booking systems run on z/OS.
Penti - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
z/OS runs on System Z systems with z10 CICS processors. Eg Mainframes.IBM System i servers are just high-end POWER servers. Running mainly Java and database loads, directly on IBM i/OS (previously i5/OS and before that AS/400) or AIX, or Linux. IBM DB2 is integrated directly into IBM i/OS.
Torment - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
And what does that setup cost?vitchilo - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
What would be great is ONE game test... like Crysis or something...And ONE X264 encode test...
Thanks a lot.