Database test: Intel Xeon 'Clovertown' X5355

SPEC CPU is an interesting test for all types of processor tasks, but there's more to life than pure maths. A common server task is running some type of database, and TPC-C is a benchmark that is often used as a measure for database performance. The test simulates the business processes of a distributor with multiple offices and hundreds of thousands of customers and products. Performance is measured in the number of transaction per minute. Since the test is sensitive to differences in the speed of the storage systems used as well as memory, a price/performance rating is given to make clear when a manufacturer ups his score artificially by investing a couple of million in hard disks. What isn't reflected in the score is the operating systems and database packages used; these may be chosen freely. Itanium and Power get their best scores running Oracle under HP-UX and running DB2 under AIX, while the x86 chips get tested pretty much exclusively running SQL Server under Windows.

It turns out that Clovertown has the best performance as well as the best price/performance ratio of all two socket servers, but it does not measure up against the big boys with four. The Opteron does not convince at first sight, but whoever takes the absolute prices into consideration instead of performance per dollar, will note that the AMD machines are the cheapest. Incidentally, the same version of SQL Server (64 bit) was used to obtain the Opteron and Clovertown scores. Woodcrest, Dempsey, and Tulsa lack SP1, which might put them at a slight disadvantage.

	TPC-C
	Power5		4		1,9GHz				429900 @ $4,99
	Itanium 2 9050		4		1,6GHz		Montecito		359440 @ $1,99
	Xeon MP 7140		4		3,4GHz		Tulsa		318407 @ $1,88
	Opteron 8220		4		2,8GHz		Santa Rosa		262989 @ $2,09
	Xeon MP 7041		4		3,0GHz		Paxville		221017 @ $8,27
	Xeon X5355		2		2,66GHz		Clovertown		240737 @ $1,85
	Itanium 2 9050		2		1,6GHz		Montecito		230569 @ $2,63
	Power5		2		1,9GHz				203440 @ $3,93
	Xeon 5160		2		3,0GHz		Woodcrest		169360 @ $2,93
	Opteron 2220		2		2,8GHz		Santa Rosa		139693 @ $2,28
	Xeon 5080		2		3,73GHz		Demspey		125954

SAP-SD (Sales & Distribution) is a similar benchmark in that it also simulates business processes, but rather than transactions per minute, it is the number of users that can work on the system simultaneously, that is given as the final score. As the name indicates, this test is aimed more at the well known ERP package than on the underlying database, but that is not to say that it is not sensitive to factors outside the processor.
Unfortunately, prices may not be listed along with the test results. What we can do instead is check the CPU loads to see whether the system was pushed to its limit. In virtually all cases the load is above 95%, with the exception of the four-way Paxville. This means that the processor was a limiting factor in the rest of the results, and there would be little point in adding extra hard disks or memory. Here, too, we see Intel's come-back: the performance for two sockets has been more than doubled and for four has increased by more than half - enough to overtake the Opteron in both cases.

	SAP-SD 2-tier
	Itanium 2 9050		4		1,6GHz		Montecito		2150
	Xeon MP 7140		4		3,4GHz		Tulsa		2127
	Opteron 2280		4		2,8GHz		Santa Rosa		1978
	Xeon MP 7041		4		3,0GHz		Paxville		1345
	Xeon X5355		2		2,66GHz		Clovertown		1806
	Xeon 5160		2		3,0GHz		Woodcrest		1285
	Opteron 2218		2		2,6GHz		Santa Rosa		1047
	Xeon 5080		2		3,73GHz		Demspey		1047
	Xeon DC		2		2,8GHz		Paxville		788

The last business benchmark is SPECjbb2005, that simulates a triple layer architecture which emphasizes the middle one, the so-called 'business logic', in which all XML processing and such takes place. The test was written entirely in Java, so the performance of the virtual machine is at least as important as that of the software itself. The score is expressed in BOPS - business operations per second. And again, Clovertown dominates with a score that even four-socket systems cannot get close to.

	SPECjbb2005
	Xeon MP 7140		4		3,4GHz		Tulsa		178201
	Opteron 8220		4		2,8GHz		Santa Rosa		143525
	Itanium 2 9050		4		1,6GHz		Montecito		138382
	Power5+		4		1,65GHz				127851
	Xeon X5355		2		2,66GHz		Clovertown		210065
	Xeon 5160		2		3,0GHz		Woodcrest		130589
	Opteron 2220		2		2,8GHz		Santa Rosa		80617
	Xeon 5080		2		3,73GHz		Dempsey		64482
	Power5+		2		1,65GHz				63544
	Xeon DC		2		2,8GHz		Paxville		49233
	UltraSparc T1		1		1,2GHz		Niagara		74365