Intel's newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP's DL585 Quad Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on November 10, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Words of thanks
A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Trevor E. Lawless, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
Markus Weingartner, Intel Germany
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.com)
Angela Rosario, Supermicro US
Michael Kalodrich, Supermicro US
Peter Yang, Supermicro US
(http://www.supermicro.com)
Peter Zaitsev, Elite MySQL Guru
(www.mysql.com)
Bob Cramblitt and Larry D. Gray
(www.spec.org)
Brecht Kets, MySQL patching and tuning
Pieter Beel, SPECjbb benchmarking
Anja Gheldof, MySQL benchmarking
Tijl Deneut, Linux support
Benchmark configuration
In case you're wondering why we chose to use the fastest Xeon DP, the second fastest Xeon MP, and the second fastest Opteron, the reason is simple: those were the CPUs that were made available to us. As always, both AMD and Intel were contacted for this test. If a manufacturer has questions about any of our benchmarks, it is discussed and if necessary the manufacturer is allowed to login to our servers and monitor our benchmarking. This allows us to use our own benchmarks and not only industry standard benchmarks, which easily fall victim of "extreme" and in some cases "non-realistic" tuning....
Hardware configurations
Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Dual Xeon DP Supermicro SS6015b-8+
Dual Xeon DP 5160 3 GHz
Intel 5000P chipset
Supermicro's X7DBR-8+
8GB (8x1024 MB) Micron FB - DIMM Registered DDR-II 533 MHz CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2 GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048 MB) Micron Registered DDR-II PC2-3200R, 400 MHz CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4 GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1048 MB) Crucial DDR333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
Dual Opteron 850 1.8 GHz
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512 MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition (2.6.15-26-amd64-server SMP)
MySQL 5.0.26 with Peter Zaitsev Mutex Patch
SPECjbb2005
Sun Hotspot Java JVM 1.5.0_08
A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Trevor E. Lawless, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
Markus Weingartner, Intel Germany
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.com)
Angela Rosario, Supermicro US
Michael Kalodrich, Supermicro US
Peter Yang, Supermicro US
(http://www.supermicro.com)
Peter Zaitsev, Elite MySQL Guru
(www.mysql.com)
Bob Cramblitt and Larry D. Gray
(www.spec.org)
Brecht Kets, MySQL patching and tuning
Pieter Beel, SPECjbb benchmarking
Anja Gheldof, MySQL benchmarking
Tijl Deneut, Linux support
Benchmark configuration
In case you're wondering why we chose to use the fastest Xeon DP, the second fastest Xeon MP, and the second fastest Opteron, the reason is simple: those were the CPUs that were made available to us. As always, both AMD and Intel were contacted for this test. If a manufacturer has questions about any of our benchmarks, it is discussed and if necessary the manufacturer is allowed to login to our servers and monitor our benchmarking. This allows us to use our own benchmarks and not only industry standard benchmarks, which easily fall victim of "extreme" and in some cases "non-realistic" tuning....
Hardware configurations
Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Dual Xeon DP Supermicro SS6015b-8+
Dual Xeon DP 5160 3 GHz
Intel 5000P chipset
Supermicro's X7DBR-8+
8GB (8x1024 MB) Micron FB - DIMM Registered DDR-II 533 MHz CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2 GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048 MB) Micron Registered DDR-II PC2-3200R, 400 MHz CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4 GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1048 MB) Crucial DDR333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
Dual Opteron 850 1.8 GHz
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512 MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition (2.6.15-26-amd64-server SMP)
MySQL 5.0.26 with Peter Zaitsev Mutex Patch
SPECjbb2005
Sun Hotspot Java JVM 1.5.0_08
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88 Comments
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Niv KA - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
I belive Clovertown is going to be announced somethime in the next week or two. On thursday I went to the "Microsoft: Ready for a New Day" here in Belgium (where Bill gates made an appearance of about half an hour, although not related!) and at the Intel booth they were showing off 4 servers which where running an "unannounced platform"! One of the technical guys at the booth let me in on a little "secret"! The Supermicro Systems were running "two sockets each box, each socket 4 cores! Eight cores each box! And the best part is its woodcrest arch!". I asked him if it was clovertown and he sayed that he "is just a technical assistant, not alowed to say anything" but he made the answer clear on his face! Clovertown is ready to go, and its FAST! They were running benchmarks all the time! I will post pictures on the fourms if I have enough time, but I have a HUGE project I need to hand in by tuesday so I might forget!
---Niv K Aharonovich
PS: About the "outdated" system comments above, I am fully on Anandtechs side, it is impossible for an online newspaper company to make enough money to BUY everything, esp. in the $15,000 area! The only way is to ask for it from the vendors, and the vendors decide what to provide! Good job anandtech and continue the good work!!!!!!!
Dennis Travis - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Great job as usuall. Keep up the excellent work.AnandThenMan - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Another bullshit "comparison" nice job guys. You are comparing an AMD system that has been out for over 2 years. Useless review as usual. Why are you not comparing new with new? Why don't you use a Xeon box that was out 2 years ago?Anandtech's reviews have become more and more worthless.
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
1. AMD has confirmed that they feel the HP DL585 with 4x 880 is a worthy competitor for our Tulsa machine.2. This server is 5 months old, not 2 years. As I made clear in the article, this is the 2006 revision.
As we invest a lot of time of effort to convince OEMs and others to send us extremely expensive hardware for review, spend weeks tweaking benchmarks and OS to give you benchmarks, we hope we may expect some useful feedback from our readers.
Just writing "useless" with little or no explanation why you feel it is worthless is not helping anyone.
AnandThenMan - Sunday, November 12, 2006 - link
I was going to post an explanation as to why the "review" is very poorly done. But Scientia over at AMDz did a far better explanation then I could come up with.http://www.amdzone.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&...">http://www.amdzone.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&...
Either the review is intentionally authored to show Intel in as best light as possible, or the author is incompetent and should not be doing reviews at all. I stand by what I originally posted, the review is bullshit.
primer - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Agreed.goldfish2 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Can I just quickly mention how nice it is to read an article where the author has managed to present all the relevant informatiom in as concise a manner as is possible, good job.JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Thanks!Server reviews are extremely time consuming so most publications are not interested in it, so I am glad AT allows me to do this kind of reviews.
AllYourBaseAreBelong2Us - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Can you guys get a new DL585 G2 and do benchmarks with this new model instead?Viditor - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
I thought this too...the G2 has 7 PCIe slots (3 x8, 4 x4), is $800 less expensive, and offers newer SCSI controllers.