Re: AMD Shanghai versus Intel Nehalem

The $ cost of more CPU power on larger machines ends up such a small %
chunk, especially after I/O cost. Sure, the CPU with HyperThreading and the
turbo might be 40% more expensive than the other CPU, but if the total
system cost is 5% more for 15% more performance . . .

It depends on how CPU limited you are. If you aren't, there isn't much of a
reason to look past the cheaper Opterons with a good I/O setup.

I've got a 2 x 5520 system with lots of RAM on the way. The problem with
lots of RAM in the Nehalem systems, is that the memory speed slows as more
is added. I think mine slows from the 1066Mhz the processor can handle to
800Mhz. It still has way more bandwidth than the old Xeons though.
Although my use case is about as far from pg_bench as you can get, I might
be able to get a run of it in during stress testing.

On 5/12/09 7:28 PM, "Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
>> Anand did SQL Server and Oracle test results, the Nehalem system looks like
>> a substantial improvement over the Shanghai Opteron 2384:
>>
>> http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3536&p=6
>> http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3536&p=7
>
> That's an interesting article. Thanks for the link. A couple points
> stick out to me.
>
> 1: 5520 to 5540 parts only have 1 133MHz step increase in performance
> 2: 550x parts have no hyperthreading.
>
> Assuming that the parts tested (5570) were using hyperthreading and
> two 133MHz steps, at the lower end of the range, the 550x parts are
> likely not that much faster than the opterons in their same clock
> speed range, but are still quite a bit more expensive.
>
> It'd be nice to see some benchmarks on the more reasonably priced CPUs
> in both ranges, the 2.2 to 2.4 GHz opterons and the 2.0 (5504) to
> 2.26GHz (5520) nehalems. Since I have to buy > 1 server to handle the
> load and provide redundancy anyway, single cpu performance isn't
> nearly as interesting as aggregate performance / $ spent.
>
> While all the benchmarks on near 3GHz parts is fun to read and
> salivate over, it's not as relevant to my interests as the performance
> of the more reasonably prices parts.
>
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