Quad Core Intel Xeon 53xx Clovertown
by Johan De Gelas on December 27, 2006 5:00 AM 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.
Jerry R. Baugh, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
William H. Lea, Intel US
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.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
Hardware Configurations
We apologize for not including the new AMD Socket F platform. We are working with several manufacturers and AMD to get socket F into our Netherlands lab. We'll definitely report back when we have then new AMD platform available. Until then we will test with what we have: socket 940 Opterons. Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Intel "Bensley platform" server
2x Xeon 5160 3GHz or 2x Xeon E5345 at 2.33GHz
Intel Server Board S5000PSL
16GB (8x 2048MB) Micron FB-DIMM Registered DDR2-533 CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048MB) Micron Registered DDR2-400 CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1024MB) Crucial Registered DDR-333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512MB Infineon Registered DDR-333, ECC enabled
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS 64 bit 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
BEA JRockit5.0 P26.4.1JDK 64bit
A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Jerry R. Baugh, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
William H. Lea, Intel US
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.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
Hardware Configurations
We apologize for not including the new AMD Socket F platform. We are working with several manufacturers and AMD to get socket F into our Netherlands lab. We'll definitely report back when we have then new AMD platform available. Until then we will test with what we have: socket 940 Opterons. Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Intel "Bensley platform" server
2x Xeon 5160 3GHz or 2x Xeon E5345 at 2.33GHz
Intel Server Board S5000PSL
16GB (8x 2048MB) Micron FB-DIMM Registered DDR2-533 CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048MB) Micron Registered DDR2-400 CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1024MB) Crucial Registered DDR-333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512MB Infineon Registered DDR-333, ECC enabled
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS 64 bit 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
BEA JRockit5.0 P26.4.1JDK 64bit
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15 Comments
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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?