Benchmarks IBM DB2: DDR400 vs DDR333

How important is the speed of the DDR memory for the Opteron? We compared buffered DDR333 ECC to the expensive buffered DDR400 ECC.

Concurrency Dual Opteron 250 DDR 333 64 bit Dual Opteron 250 DDR 400 64 bit DDR400 vs DDR333
1 60 61 1%
2 112 118 5%
5 136 137 1%
10 141 145 3%
20 138 147 6%
35 139 150 7%
50 140 145 4%

DDR400 gives a boost of about 4% - 6%. That might seem very little, but considering that DDR400 is only 20% faster than DDR333, and the 128 KB L1 and 1 MB L2-cache on board the Opteron, we can say that Database performance on the Opteron still benefits from faster memory.

Benchmarks IBM DB2 8.1.3: Intel versus AMD Benchmarks IBM DB2: Single versus Dual versus Quad
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  • smn198 - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    Would love to see how MS SQL performs in similar tests.
  • mrVW - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    This test seems foolish to me. A 1GB database? All of that fits in ram.

    A database server is all about being the most reliable form of STORAGE, not some worthless repeat queries that you should cache anyway.

    Transactions, logging... I mean how realistic is it to have a 1GB of database on a system with 4GB of RAM and expensive DB2 software.

    A real e-commerce site likeMWave, NewEgg, Crucial could have 20GB per year! Names, addresses, order detail, customer support history, etc.

    Once you get over a certain size, a database is all about disk (putting logging on one disk indepdent of the daata, etc.). The indexes do the main searching work.

    This whole test seems geared to be CPU focused, but only a hardware hacker would apply software in such a crazy way.

  • mrdudesir - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    man i would love to have one of those systems. Great job on the review you guys, its good to know that there are places where you can still get great independent analysis.
  • Zac42 - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    mmmmmmm Quad Opterons......
  • Snoop - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    Great read
  • ksherman - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

    is that pic from the 'lab'? (the one on pg 1)

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