The Intel Xeon 5670: Six Improved Cores

Final Words

In a few weeks, there will be new dual CPU offerings from both AMD and Intel. We will need to start over again, so any conclusion we make today has a very short lifespan. For those of you who did not find the right benchmark among the ones we presented here, we will add more benchmarks then. Power consumption is also on our to do list. Our first power tests show there is little difference between the power consumption of the same server whether it contains 32 nm six-core X5670 or 45 nm quad-core X5570 CPUs.

So what can we conclude so far? Add two cores and a few tweaks to a server CPU architecture which already has the fastest cores on the market and you’ll get very impressive results. Right now, the six-core Xeon wins every comparison with a similar dual CPU configuration. The interesting thing to note is that the margin varies heavily with the type of application.

ERP applications and OLTP databases benefit a lot from the increased L3-cache, hyperthreading and the extra cores. The result is that those applications show absolutely stunning results for Intel: the dual CPU platform is just as fast as AMD best quad CPU configurations. With twice the amount of performance per core there is simply no other option than Intel.

The a similar picture appears for the well scaling native applications such as OLAP or DSS databases. The Xeon 5670 did not slaughter the competition there, but it was still significantly ahead. Be aware though that many native applications will only scale well in certain scenarios. Database size, usage patterns, disk performance and other factors must all be considered. It is not because your application runs on Oracle or SQL Server that it will automatically make good use of the extra cores and threads.  A single six-core Xeon will be fast enough in a lot of cases and a second CPU might only add 30% or so.

The only server of which the performance almost always scales well with extra cores is a virtualized one, providing there are no other hardware bottlenecks of course. If you are shopping around for a server which has to house lots and lots of light VMs (VDI comes to mind), the VMmark results point only in one direction: the new six-core Xeon. At the other end of the performance spectrum is our own “heavy duty” virtualization benchmarking. Running 8 very heavy VMs requiring 24 virtual CPUs runs still best on the Intel Xeon on ESX. When it comes to Hyper-V, the difference is a lot smaller. So for those of you who want to consolidate on Hyper-V, we would advise you to wait a few more weeks. Octal cores from Intel and AMD and twelve-cores from AMD will make the next server CPU comparison much more tense.