High-End x86: The Nehalem EX Xeon 7500 and Dell R810
by Johan De Gelas on April 12, 2010 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Nehalem EX
SAP S&D 2-Tier
SAP S&D 2-Tier | |
Operating System | Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition |
Software | SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement package 4 |
Benchmark software | Industry Standard benchmark version 2009 |
Typical error margin | Very low |
The SAP SD (Sales and Distribution, 2-tier internet configuration) benchmark is an interesting benchmark as it is a real world client-server application. We decided to look at SAP's benchmark database. The results below all run on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition and MS SQL Server 2005 database (both 64-bit). Every "2-tier Sales & Distribution" benchmark was performed with SAP's latest ERP 6 enhancement package 4. These results are not comparable with any benchmark performed before 2009. The new "2009" version of the benchmark obtains scores that are 25% lower. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our previous server oriented article. The profile of the benchmark has remained the same:
- Very parallel resulting in excellent scaling
- Low to medium IPC, mostly due to "branchy" code
- Somewhat limited by memory bandwidth
- Likes large caches (memory latency!)
- Very sensitive to sync ("cache coherency") latency
Since we gather the benchmark data from the SAP site, we have to work with what we found so far. A quad Xeon X7560 outperforms an octal-core Opteron 8435 at 2.6GHz by small margin (3%). A quad Opteron 6176 at 2.3GHz should score about 48k-50k. That is competitive performance, but this market will probably prefer the Xeon platform, as price is less an issue and reliability features are on top of the checklist. The Power 7 servers outperform the Nehalem EX CPUs, but the top models (3.55GHz) cost around $100k.
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klstay - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
I agree. Being able to use all the DIMM slots in the R810 with only half the CPU sockets populated is a neat trick, and I do like having up to 16 drive bays in the R910, but overall the latest IBM 3850 is much more flexible than either of those systems. From a 2 socket 4 cores each system with 32GB RAM up to an 8 socket 8 cores each system with 3TB RAM. Barring some big surprises at HPs announcement in a couple of weeks IBM will be the one to beat in Nehalem EX for the foreseeable future.Etern205 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
The AMD Opteron 6128 isn't $523.It's $299.99!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
(credited to: zpdixon @ DT for providing the link)
yuhong - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
"but when a dual-CPU configuration outperforms quad-CPU configurations of your top-of-the-line CPU, something is wrong. "Remember Xeon 7100 vs Xeon 5300?