Balancing Power, Price, and Performance in the Server CPU World
by Johan De Gelas on March 3, 2011 7:07 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- AMD
- Intel
- 1000W
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Virtual Performance on vSphere 4
Performance might not be the top priority when you buy these types of servers, but it is still important. The Tyan server can have up 96GB of RAM, so you don't want the CPU to become a bottleneck when you are consolidating your workloads. You also want quite a bit of future headroom in case you like postponing the capital investment in new servers.
So we turned to our vApusMark II, which runs eight virtual machines. Each virtual machine contains a real-world application, not just benchmarks. You can find a detailed description of how vApusMark II is set up and configured here.
Interestingly, the L5630 wins with a 17% margin thanks to Hyper-Threading. The Opteron 4170 HE holds its own pretty well considering it is three times cheaper. However, it is important to understand that the lower the price of the CPU, the less impact it will have in the overall capital investment in the servers.
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Zoomer - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Sure, obviously McAfee can magically make chips designed and produced before the acquisition more secure.duploxxx - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
SAP:http://www.sap.com/ecosystem/customers/directories...
oracle:
Is turning all heads up side down, once they notice the volume shrink of x86 they will also drop it
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/analystreports/...
HangFire - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
"...very inexpensive server, with a barebone price of only ~$1500 for two servers."Did you mean "sockets"?
Penti - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
He means two servers. Or rather two nodes if you like. 2 pieces 2-way server.bobbozzo - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link
That server has 2 dual-socket motherboards in 1U; it's 2 servers in one, each with 2 CPU sockets.ERJ - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Home electric pricing is very different than rack pricing. Consider, for a good datacenter, you need UPS and power generators capable of matching every watt in use. You need pdu's. You have extra heat generation so you need additional cooling.For our colo space we pay somewhere in the range of $500 a month for a 30amp 120v circuit. Getting the best performance per watt is definitely part of our criteria.
Stuka87 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
I gotta thank you for the laugh. Never have I thought the word "craps" would make me laugh so much. I think it may be that you seem to use that word in every single post combined with one of the most narrow minded points of views I have seen on this site.All our craps are belong to you.
silverblue - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
AMD must be good at the casino, what with all these "craps".I've long since filed sans2212 in the same category as SiliconDoc, under "has nothing to bring to the discussion whatsoever aside of (an initial period of) light entertainment for all readers (which rapidly becomes tedious)".
VJ - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
"You can get a slightly faster 1.8GHz version, the 4164 EE, but that chip costs more than twice as much ($698). As we are searching for low power and inexpensive CPUs, it didn't make the cut. The only disadvantage other than the lower clock speed is the lower clocked HT3 link at 2GT/s instead of 6.4GT/s."It's a bit of a weird paragraph since I was first thinking that you were suggesting the 4164 EE does 6.4GT/s but (for your sake) I can also interpret "instead of" in the final sentence to refer to the other AMD cpus you're testing here.
But it's still a deficient paragraph considering "the lower clocked HT3", since in reality, this resolves to an HT1 (for the 4162 EE).
It's like a car test mentioning a "less powerful V8 engine" when they're referring to a V6.
Gaat lekker, he?
oneoho - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
great article, I was about to build some low power consumption / cooling requirement servers. This will help immensely.