Intel Xeon 3.6 2MB vs AMD Opteron 252 Database Test
by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on February 14, 2005 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
It's been five months since either of the processor giants released a new server processor. Today, both Intel and AMD have new offerings. Intel has updated their 3.6 GHz Xeon to include an additional 1MB of L2 cache, and AMD has bumped their quickest Opteron up 200Mhz to 2.6GHz with the Opteron 252. Neither one of these upgrades is groundbreaking, but they do offer some performance increases, especially the 2MB Xeon. We'll see some more significant releases later this year from both manufacturers with their Dual Core offerings.
Intel's Update
Instead of a clock increase, Intel decided to throw some cache at the existing 3.6 Xeon units. In one of our previous articles, we took a look at a 4MB Gallatin Xeon and compared it to an Opteron. The results showed that the 4MB cache on the Gallatin didn't boast any large increases over that of the Opteron with 1MB of L2 cache. The main reason for that was the 400Mhz bus, which starved the Gallatin of precious bandwidth. Times have changed; Intel recognized the bandwidth issue and today, an extra 1MB of L2 cache on the 800Mhz bus that the Nocona and Irwindale Xeons offer does make a difference. Of course, the difference depends entirely on the workload, which we'll explain further as we reveal our results.
AMD's Update
The Opteron 252 is mostly a clock speed increase from 2.4GHz to 2.6GHz, but there are a few of other differences that are worth mentioning. The packaging has changed on the new 252 from ceramic to organic - you can see the difference from a 250 to the 252 below. Aside from the packaging, AMD has also thrown in SSE3 instructions, increased the HyperTransport to 1GHz, and the 252 is manufactured on 90nm. As for the Dual Core roadmap for AMD, it remains on schedule for mid-2005. Dual core Opterons will be socket compatible with existing 940 pin sockets that support 90nm (95W/80A).
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64bit SQL Server Tests?
In our recent SQL articles, we've been asked, "where are the 64 bit tests?" Who cares about 32 bit based tests? First, we're right on top of 64 bit testing for SQL Server - remember that this application is still in beta. Regarding the second question, the large majority of SQL Server database servers are running on 32 bit platforms, so a lot of people do care. That being said, 64 bit SQL Server is definitely sought after, and we are going to provide coverage as soon as we can.
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Jason Clark - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
An article we are contemplating is desktop parts in a SQL test, and web. Lots of folks in smaller orgranizations and even medium to some extent build their own boxes.Interesting?
Regs - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Thanks for Clarifying me #24. For some odd reason I'm thinking about the differences between the branch predicator of a A64 and Intel and I got in over my head.But you are right about the cache, spatial and temporal locality.
rivieracadman - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
I would suspect that the raw speed of the Xeon coupled with the larger cash to reduce latency would make the Xeon perform well in any benchmark that was both threaded and delt with small data sets, such as reads, queries, and searches. On the other hand, the Opteron due to its lower memory access overhead, and shear bandwidth, would do better in areas with large data sets such as data transfers, data recovery, and large complex calculations. If this is correct, which you have pretty much confirmed, then I would suspect that the Opteron would do better in the web server tests as long as the pages served were larger then say 15K. Not that this is any magical number, but the Xeon would have to pull from memory more at this point.As for the HT bus. I wouldn't think you would use the entire 1Ghz bus on a database benchmark. You really need to perform some workstation benchmarks to fill the bus.
Since everyone else here is adding to the wish list. I would like to see a real world combined query, read, change, write benchmark. I think the Xeon does better when searching and reading because of its shear speed, but the Opteron would do better when a record is altered and resubmitted to a database. This is more of a real world example in my opinion, and since both are architectually diffrent, it would allow for both CPUs to show their true colors in what would be considered every tasks.
blckgrffn - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Having repetitive data is what having cache is all about, the long pipelined architecture of the P4 needs the large local cache to minimize time-expensive ram lookups to compensate for the time-expensive deep pipe operations that get tossed when mis-predicted. So, the 2meg cache could help the prescott in many places and is not limited only to SQL. I think that we can probably look at the the EE P4's and get a feeling for what the new prescotts will bring to the table, but we can hope that all of those additions that were made to the Prescott core are allowed to shine with more cache present.fitten - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
#9, this was a server benchmark test. Servers are about stability and such. Anyone who overclocks a critical server (database, etc.) should be fired on the spot.They may do overclocking tests in the workstation review that was mentioned.
Ross Whitehead - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
#20 - I agree the AMDs instructions/clock count is high, but we were surprised that the 25% increase in HT did not provide any measurable difference.Regs - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
*Their IPC counts are higher*Need more coffee
Regs - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
#11 - I doubt there will be a performance gain for games with just added cache. The problem with the prescott is it's low IPC core and leakage. Anyways, Apps on the desk top use a lot of repeatedly used data arrays with similar instruction sets. So why would the CPU core benefit a larger L2 cache for games when it's just going to be the similar type of code it just processed?#16 - AMD's are not bandwidth starved. Their high instructions per clock count are higher. So the pipeline is a lot shorter which means it does not run a risk of pipeline stalls if it was not fed enough data from the bus unlike the Intel.
Jason Clark - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
mickyb,Quad 3.6 Xeon systems don't exist as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong. Quad Xeon systems are still the 400MHz FSB Xeons that are clocked at most 3GHz.
mickyb - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
The Intel XEON has always been competitive. You guys are thinking about gaming. I would like to see 4 way perforamnce and see a graph on benchmarks compared to number of CPUs. AMD has previously done well in this area.