Intel Xeon 7460: Six Cores to Bulldoze Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on September 23, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
SAP SD
The SAP SD (Sales and Distribution, 2-tier internet configuration) benchmark is an extremely interesting benchmark as it is a real world client-server application. We decided to look at SAP's benchmark database. The results below are 2-tier benchmarks, so the database and the underlying OS can make a big difference. Unless we keep those parameters the same, we cannot compare the results. The results below all run on a Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition and MS SQL Server 2005 database (both 64-bit), and each "2-tier Sales & Distribution" benchmark was performed on SAP's "ERP release 2005".
In our previous server-oriented article, we summed up a rough profile of SAP S&D:
- Very parallel resulting in excellent scaling
- Low to medium IPC, mostly due to "branchy" code
- Not really limited by memory bandwidth
- Likes large caches
- Sensitive to Sync ("cache coherency") latency
AMD has held the performance crown in SAP S&D since the launch of the 8360SE at 2.5GHz, but the Intel six-core monster overpowers the latest quad-core Opteron. The huge cache, less cache coherency traffic between the sockets, and two extra cores make the new Xeon close to invincible. Even AMD's 45nm Opteron (Shanghai) will most likely not be able to outperform the Intel behemoth: the increase in L3 cache and small IPC improvements will probably not be able to negate the effect of two extra cores for Dunnington.
Until AMD starts shipping its 6-core products at the end of 2009, Intel will have a firm grip on the ERP and high-end database market. The SAP benchmark confirms that for this type of workload, the Xeon 74xx platform is close to unbeatable. However, we need to look at more than the high-end database market. What about virtualization?
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duploxxx - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
your virtualisation life was very short, perhaps marketing can keep you alive for a while since on paper you are better with the amount of cores.your 24 cores @2,66ghz are just killed by 16cores @2,7ghz
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html">http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html
synergyek - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Why only testing scanline render? It's a slow and old monster. Can you add mental ray render to your tests or, maybe, vray, which is used in arch. visualizations? Also you can use Maya 32/64-bit (software, hardware, mental ray tests) for both windows and linux platforms. Mental ray on Vray uses all cores available in the system, and results must be much better, than ordinary scanline.duploxxx - Saturday, September 27, 2008 - link
Nice article, altough in virtualisation with VMmark it was already clear that the new dunnington had more headroom with the additional cores.only few remark, since you are talking about a retail price of +25000euro you could at least add for information that there are 8socket barcelona for about 5000euro more that scale again way better then dunnington with its 32 cores. So indeed intel did a step up again after there tigertown was heavy beaten by new barcelona in 4s even in low speed but at a certain cost of platform, afterall this dunnington is not cheap. it will be the question what a 4s shangai @3.0 ghz will do against this 6 core giant, afterall it is a huge die and the shangai will be way cheaper and consume less.
lets hope you update this nice article with the soon to be released shangai.
Sirlach - Friday, September 26, 2008 - link
From my research when the hex cores were announced the super micro boards came with an x16 slot. Is it possible to see how CPU restricted multithreaded games perform on this monster? Since it is running server 2008 this is theoretically possible!BaronMatrix - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
It seems like a better comparison would be with the number of cores the same. You could take a 4S and remove one chip and match that against a 2S Dunnington.From what I saw, it is nowhere near 50% faster though it has 50% more cores plus 4 times the cache. It looks like Intel may NEVER catch up with Opteron. Shanghai will just increase the difference.
It's just a shame Hector decided to have a "devalue the brand name" fire-sale or we'd be much closer to Bulldozer and SSE5.
trivik12 - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
4S has been one market where AMD dominated even after conroe's release. With Tigerton intel chipped away AMD's market share bcos of barcelona issues. with Dunnington Intel has a performance advantage. U dont look at per core performance but overall platform performance. AMD needs to catch up soon bcos with beckton AMD will be behind 8th ball in that market as well.snakeoil - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
intel is cannibalizing nehalem this are desperate measures from a desperate man.this is a dead end road, sooner or later intel will have to dump the front side bus,but its evident that intel is not very confident about nehalem and quick path.
these processor are the last kick of an agonizing technology.
this is just a souped up old car. nothing more.
kingmouf - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
Although a good thing for testing, I'm wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems.Off-chip activity (coming from signal amplifiers, sensors, external buses etc) results in great power consumption. Actually one should expect it to be a crucial part of the total consumption of a system. In this case, I believe the AMD system has an advantage with the memory controller being incorporated in the processor chip. To one extend this also becomes clear in your testing.
Comparing the Intel CPUs one may observe that the 6-core part has a huge cache memory that seriously limits the main memory accesses. In the case of the 6VMs, there will also be reduced inter-socket communication. Both result in very serious reductions in off-chip activity, which materialises in a whopping 25% reduction in power usage.
Therefore I believe that making the benchmarking process more memory intensive, as you point is the real-world scenario, AMD could earn quite a few points there.
On a more general argument now, I can't stop thinking that chips like the 74xx Xeons are somewhat a waste of transistors. Intel is simply following the "bully" path rather than the "smart" path. I cannot stop thinking what would the results look like if instead of the two extra cores and the huge amount of cache, Intel added a TCP offload engine, a true hardware RAID controller, a block cipher accelerator, a DSP engine or an extra FP processor core (I'm not mentioning a memory controller because someone will pop up and say that they have already done that in the nehalem). All these things - and one could add much more - are integral to any server or HPC system and I believe can offer much more countable results than the two extra cores. Better performance and definitely better power usage. On the other hand, considering the weaknesses of AMD, maybe that is the company that should really get down to it.
Not long there was a lot of hype of AMD opening up their socket and coherent HyperTransport so that people could actually produce accelerators. What has happened with that? Are there any products on that market? It would be interesting to see some benchmarking with these things. :)
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
"Im wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems. "You are right that most virtualized workloads (including the OLTP ones) will need a lot more memory *space*, but they are not necessarily more memory intensive. It is good practice for example to use another scheduler to make it more CPU intensive: you are getting more transactions per second on the same machine. It is pretty bad to lose your watts on anything else but transactions.
jedz - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
It's pretty obvious that AMD is not competing neck to neck in the server arena with their current opteron offerings because of the fact that they are way behind Intel's, and it's not right to compare the opteron to an intel7460 in terms of performance/watt. Why don't you wait for AMD's Shanghai and then redo this benchmarking process.Maybe it will do justice for AMD....