Quad Core Intel Xeon 53xx Clovertown
by Johan De Gelas on December 27, 2006 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
ERP: SAP Sales & Distribution
Enterprise Resource Planning software is one type of very complex database application. Studies have shown that the performance profile of these applications can be significantly different from that of the underlying database. So we decided to take a look at SAP's benchmark database, to see if we can extract some extra benchmark information to complete our view of the quad core Xeon.
The results below are two 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. As the only results for the quad core Xeon which are available have been run on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition and MS SQL Server 2005 (both 64 bit), we filtered the results to find systems that were run on the same OS and database. With the exception of the Xeon 5160, all systems are equipped with 32GB of RAM. All these benchmarks are done on the SAP "ERP release 2005" two tier Sales & Distribution benchmark.
Unfortunately we have no comparison with an Opteron system. We can solve that by keeping every parameter the same, but now we take a look at the benchmarking that happened on SAP release 2004.
If you go to SAP's two tier benchmark results page, you will notice that the performance differences between similar systems benchmarked on release 2004 and 2005 are minor. The reason why the difference between the Xeon 5160 servers in our tables is about 15% is that the first benchmark resulted in a 1.71 response time and the second had a response time of 1.98. Given a similar response time we can be pretty sure that the results would be very similar. To summarize, if we keep all parameters the same, the benchmark results of the first table should be comparable to the results of the second table. So, while it is not an exact science, a dual quad core Xeon at 2.66GHz should be about 55% faster than a dual Xeon 5160. It is also a bit slower than a quad socket Opteron 2.6GHz system. SAP scales very well with additional cores; based on our assumptions we may conclude that both the Xeon and the Opteron system improve by about 70% when moving from four to eight cores.
One other item warrants mention: the Xeon MP "Tulsa" seems to outperform its dual socket sibling by a small margin, and confirms the good integer performance profile than we noticed in Specjbb 2005.
Enterprise Resource Planning software is one type of very complex database application. Studies have shown that the performance profile of these applications can be significantly different from that of the underlying database. So we decided to take a look at SAP's benchmark database, to see if we can extract some extra benchmark information to complete our view of the quad core Xeon.
The results below are two 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. As the only results for the quad core Xeon which are available have been run on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition and MS SQL Server 2005 (both 64 bit), we filtered the results to find systems that were run on the same OS and database. With the exception of the Xeon 5160, all systems are equipped with 32GB of RAM. All these benchmarks are done on the SAP "ERP release 2005" two tier Sales & Distribution benchmark.
| SAP ERP Release 2005 Windows 2003 EE |
||||||
| CPU | Cores | CPU Type | CPU Speed (MHz) | Response Time (s) | SAPS | Central Server |
| 4 | 8 | Intel Xeon 7041 | 3000 | 1.97 | 5630 | Hitachi HA8000 Model 270 |
| 2 | 4 | Intel Xeon 5160 | 3000 | 1.71 | 5020 | Hitachi HA8000 Model 130 |
| 2 | 8 | Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 | 2660 | 1.97 | 8770 | FS PRIMERGY Model TX300 S3 / RX300 S3 |
| 2 | 8 | Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 | 2660 | 1.98 | 8970 | HP ProLiant DL380 G5 |
Unfortunately we have no comparison with an Opteron system. We can solve that by keeping every parameter the same, but now we take a look at the benchmarking that happened on SAP release 2004.
| SAP ERP Release 2004 Windows 2003 EE |
||||||
| Number of processors | Number of cores | CPU Type | CPU Speed (MHz) | Response Time (s) | SAPS | Central Server |
| 4 | 8 | Intel XEON 7140M | 3400 | 1.99 | 10650 | HP ProLiant DL580 G4 |
| 4 | 8 | AMD Opteron processor Model 8220SE | 2800 | 1.97 | 9920 | HP ProLiant DL585 G2 |
| 4 | 8 | Intel XEON 7140M | 3400 | 1.97 | 9850 | Dell PowerEdge 6850 |
| 4 | 8 | AMD Opteron processor Model 8218 | 2600 | 1.98 | 9570 | HP ProLiant BL45p G2 |
| 4 | 8 | AMD Opteron processor Model 885 | 2600 | 1.97 | 8520 | Sun Blade x8400 |
| 4 | 8 | AMD Opteron processor Model 880 | 2400 | 1.96 | 7520 | FS PRIMERGY Model BX630 |
| 4 | 8 | AMD Opteron processor Model 875 | 2200 | 1.84 | 7020 | FS PRIMERGY Model BFa40 |
| 2 | 4 | Intel XEON 5160 | 3000 | 1.98 | 5780 | FS PRIMERGY Model RX200 S3 |
| 2 | 4 | AMD Opteron processor Model 880 | 2400 | 1.87 | 4400 | FS PRIMERGY Model BX630 |
If you go to SAP's two tier benchmark results page, you will notice that the performance differences between similar systems benchmarked on release 2004 and 2005 are minor. The reason why the difference between the Xeon 5160 servers in our tables is about 15% is that the first benchmark resulted in a 1.71 response time and the second had a response time of 1.98. Given a similar response time we can be pretty sure that the results would be very similar. To summarize, if we keep all parameters the same, the benchmark results of the first table should be comparable to the results of the second table. So, while it is not an exact science, a dual quad core Xeon at 2.66GHz should be about 55% faster than a dual Xeon 5160. It is also a bit slower than a quad socket Opteron 2.6GHz system. SAP scales very well with additional cores; based on our assumptions we may conclude that both the Xeon and the Opteron system improve by about 70% when moving from four to eight cores.
One other item warrants mention: the Xeon MP "Tulsa" seems to outperform its dual socket sibling by a small margin, and confirms the good integer performance profile than we noticed in Specjbb 2005.
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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?