Intel Clovertown: Quad Core for the Masses
by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on March 30, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
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.
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.
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Visual - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
the two xeon sockets share a common fsb to memory and io bus, right?perhaps you should have included a 1-socket xeon vs 2-socket opteron, just to see how they compare when the xeons aren't as starved for bandwidth... not necessarily a 775 xeon and mobo, i imagine the 771 systems you used now would run just fine with just one of the cpu-s.
sure, that would turn into a core 2 extreme quadcore vs amd 4x4, or their server equivalents running server benchmarks instead of games but i'm still curious about it :p
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I believe (could be wrong - it might be a future chipset; can't say I'm up-to-date on the server chipsets these days) that the Xeons have a Dual Independent Bus configuration, so they do get double the bandwidth. The only truly fair way of comparing would be a quad core AMD chip against a quad core Intel chip, but we obviously have to wait on AMD there. It's certainly going to be an interesting matchup later this year.Note that in 2008, Intel will use a quad bus topology similar to HyperTransport, at least on paper, so they are certainly aware of the bus bandwidth problems right now. I'm not sure FB-DIMMs are really helping matters either unless you use huge memory footprints. So FB-DIMMs can be good in the real world but bad for benchmarks that don't utilize all the available RAM.
DigitalFreak - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
FB-DIMMs are also un-godly expensive if you need to have 16+ GB in a 2U box. With the Opteron boxes, you tend to have many more DIMM slots, so you can use lower capacity DIMMs.yyrkoon - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I thought my eyes were decieving me, so I had to go back and look at the charts. AMD CPUs are capable or more transactions per second ? Wow. Granted, AMD CPUs also seem to use more power, but they also seem to have a 'better' CPU usage curve.I suppose most companies, and enterprises would probably opt for the intel, based on long term power savings, and probably have an Opteron machine or two, where performance was critical.
It is nice to know, that AMD still does something better than intel. Makes me feel better about buying an Opteron 1210 for my desktop, even if it isnt a socket F Opteron . . .
Phynaz - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
No.
The tested SYSTEM is capable of more transactions per second.
defter - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
You mean that four top of the line AMD cpus were outperforming two second fastest Intel's CPUs?Clovertown's performance is very impressive, since according to those results two top of the line 2.66GHz Clowertowns would match performance of four 2.8GHz Opteron.
Viditor - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
It may be less impressive than you think as 4 dual core 2.4GHz Opterons beat 2 quad core 2.33GHz Clovertowns (by 16%).
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I'm not sure where you get that comparison. Four dual core 2.8 GHz Opterons beat two 2.33 GHz Clovertown by 16% - in certain situations.Viditor - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
If you scroll up a few posts in this thread, you'll see the quote and link...
"...Two 2.4GHz Opteron 880 processors are as fast as one Xeon 5345, but four Opterons outperform the dual quad core Xeon by 16%..."
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
Ah, right. I think that's part of what Ross was talking about when he discusses the difficulties in coming up with appropriates tests for these systems. The Forum and Dell Store benchmarks had some serious issues, likely related to optimizations and I/O activity. There are instances where Intel does better, and of course others where they do worse.