Re: AMD Shanghai versus Intel Nehalem

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.