Database test: AMD Socket F

Three different versions of MySQL have been tested, namely 4.1.20, 5.0.18 and 5.1.9 (beta). In our tests, the differences between those turned out to be minimal: for all three versions, the new Opteron with DDR2-667 proved to be slower than the current model with DDR400. On average, over all versions, load levels and number of cores, Socket F loses to Socket 940 with a difference in performance of approximately 8 percent. Even if we increase the results of Socket F slightly to compensate for the fact that the Socket 940 system had more memory on board, the net loss remains. The extra 4GB of memory only delivered an increased performance of about 2 percent in our situation.

With faster memory (DDR2-800), the performance of the new Opteron could possibly be bumped up slightly. However, it is clear that the effect of Socket F's extra memory bandwidth in certain cases (such as our web site database) can be minimal. This conclusion is no big surprise, since we observed the same pattern for Socket AM2 in desktop systems. Still, there are conceivably situations where the DDR2 memory does give a boost in performance.