Quad Core Intel Xeon 53xx Clovertown
by Johan De Gelas on December 27, 2006 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Secure Socket Layers RSA Performance
Secure web communication is possible through the utilization of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Using "openssl speed rsa" we can measure the number of RSA public keys (sign) operations that a system can perform per second using OpenSSL 0.9.8a. Both verifies/s and signs/s benchmarks are rather synthetic, but give an idea of the "pure" encrypting and decrypting speed.
Note that this time we did not compile OpenSSL with specific flags for each architecture (march="xxx") but we used the same flags on each CPU. We feel that this better reflects the real world use of SSL as most people do not know the specific CPU architecture they are running on. So we compiled with the following on all x86 systems:
In the case of doing verifies, the server has to authenticate the identity of the client. This is a lot less intensive, and we show you the verifies/s numbers at 2048 bits. At 1024 bits length, both the Woodcrest and Opteron were able to verify more than 50,000 keys per core, and that is a hard limit of the OpenSSL benchmark.
Both benchmarks behave as expected. All CPUs scale almost perfectly: this benchmark runs in the caches. The Opteron remains on top, as it offers better OpenSSL performance per clock.
Secure web communication is possible through the utilization of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Using "openssl speed rsa" we can measure the number of RSA public keys (sign) operations that a system can perform per second using OpenSSL 0.9.8a. Both verifies/s and signs/s benchmarks are rather synthetic, but give an idea of the "pure" encrypting and decrypting speed.
Note that this time we did not compile OpenSSL with specific flags for each architecture (march="xxx") but we used the same flags on each CPU. We feel that this better reflects the real world use of SSL as most people do not know the specific CPU architecture they are running on. So we compiled with the following on all x86 systems:
gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -O3 -Wa,-noexecstack -g -Wall -DMD32_REG_T=int -DMD5_ASMIn the case of doing verifies, the server has to authenticate the identity of the client. This is a lot less intensive, and we show you the verifies/s numbers at 2048 bits. At 1024 bits length, both the Woodcrest and Opteron were able to verify more than 50,000 keys per core, and that is a hard limit of the OpenSSL benchmark.
Both benchmarks behave as expected. All CPUs scale almost perfectly: this benchmark runs in the caches. The Opteron remains on top, as it offers better OpenSSL performance per clock.
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zsdersw - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
Smithfield/Paxville is a MCM chip (two pieces of silicon in one package), as well.
Khato - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Agreed on it being quite the good review, save for the lack of power consumption numbers/analysis. Form factor and power consumption can be just as important as the performance when the application can be spread across multiple machines, now can't it? At the very least, it would be nice to link to the power consumption numbers for the opteron platform in the first review it showed up in (which puts the dual clovertown at 365W load, while the quad 880 is supposedly 657W load.)rowcroft - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Loved the article, great job.I'm in the process of purchasing two dual quad core servers for VMWare use. Looking at the cost to performance analysis, it would be worth mentioning that many of the high end applications are licensed on a per socket basis. This alone is saving us $20,000 on our VMWare license and making it a compelling solution.
I would love to see more of this type of article as well- very interesting and not something you can easily find elsewhere on the net. (Tom's hardware reviewed the chip running XP Pro!)
duploxxx - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
If you think that reading this review will help you to decide what to buy as VMWARE base you are going the wrong way! Yes these small tests are in favor for the new MCW architecture as we saw before and since haevy workload seems hard to test for some sites like anand! keep in mind that VMWARE is heavy workload, you combine the cpu and ram to whatever you want, guess what the fsb can't be combined like you wish!thinking that a 2x quad will outperform the 4p opteron is a big laugh! the fsb will kill youre whole ESX instantly from 4+ os on your system with normal load.
the money you save is indeed for sure, the power you loose is an other thing!
friendly info from a certified esx 3.0 beta tester :)
Viditor - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Probably one of your most thorough and well-rounded articles Johan...many thanks!It was nice to see you working with large (16GB) memory.
If you do get a Socket F system, will you be updating the article?