Intel Clovertown: Quad Core for the Masses

Benchmarking Clovertown

What do you compare Clovertown to? Since there are no other quad core solutions to compare it to, we were stuck with how to compare it. Do you compare it only to existing dual socket options, Woodcrest and Opteron? Do you compare it only to existing eight way options, quad socket Opteron? There is no perfect answer, but we decided that comparing it to the previous Intel solution, Woodcrest, allowed us to explore scalability of the quad core architecture vs. the dual core architecture.

We also decided to include quad socket Opteron numbers for reference. We recognize that comparing a quad socket server to a dual socket server is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but we decided to provide the results regardless until we see K10 and can do a proper comparison of quad core technologies. Let's not lose track that we are comparing two different technologies with totally different cost structures and power consumption profiles.

Another problem we had was the additional processing power that Clovertown provided with two sockets and eight cores. We found that we could no longer run our previous benchmarks, Dell DVD Store and our Forums Benchmark, as we did not have enough I/O throughput to handle the additional processing power. In our lab we have a Promise VTrak J300s which is a 12 disk SAS chassis, but we found that using 12 disks was not enough for our old benchmarks. We estimated we needed approximately 36-48 disks to be able to continue running our OLTP benchmarks. We were not able to "obtain" the required chassis and spindles so we decided to change our benchmark suite.

We did consider several SSD flash based disks but it seems there are more "announced" SSD Flash based drives than there are "shipping" drives. Until we can significantly increase our IP capacity in our lab we will no longer be running OLTP based benchmarks. Our preference to increase our I/O capacity would be an SSD solution as it would not require spinning dozens of drives in several chassis but... neither is available to us at this time.