Our second encounter with Intel's Xeon 'Woodcrest' was actually just as good as the first. The somewhat disappointing scaling behaviour is well-compensated by the overall better performance. It is often the case that top-of-the-line models do not offer the best value for money and the Xeon 5160 processors in our Dell PowerEdge 'Apollo 5' are no exception: the 3.0Ghz models are 23% more expensive than the 2.66GHz versions, and on top of that they have a TDP that is 23% higher, but in exchange they offer no more than 10% performance gains. We are lucky enough in not having to save on every Watt or euro, but there are plenty of customers out there who do not have this luxury.
Although benchmarking our Apollo 5 has not revealed anything shocking, we have obtained our sixth data point in our series of server reviews: a handy reference for use in future reviews. So, to conclude this article, let's list all the hardware we've tested so far: Apollo 5 (3.0GHz Woodcrest), Fujitsu-Siemens RX300 (2.66GHz Woodcrest and 3.73GHz Dempsey), Sun Fire X4200 (2.4GHz Opteron Socket 940), Sun Fire T2000 (1.0GHz Niagara) and MSI K9SD Master (2.4GHz Opteron Socket F). More extensive specifications of these machines can be found here.
Earlier articles in this series
4-9-2006: Intel Xeon 'Woodcrest' 2,66GHz 30-7-2006: AMD Opteron Socket F 27-7-2006: Sun UltraSparc T1 vs. AMD Opteron 19-4-2006: Xeon vs. Opteron, single- en dualcore (in Dutch)