AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison

AnandTech Website Database Performance Transactions per Second Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) AMD Athlon MP 2100+ (1.73GHz) x 2 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 AMD Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) x 2 AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 1.7GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz (HT Enabled) AMD Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Xeon 2.2GHz AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz Intel Xeon 1.7GHz 806.7 773.7 734.8 728.1 708.6 699.8 544.0 537.6 469.2 468.6 417.4 393.9 331.0 | 0 | 161 | 323 | 484 | 645 | 807 | 968

Here we see that the dual Athlon MP 2100+ is able to outperform the dual Xeon 2.2GHz setup but the fastest 2.4GHz parts manage to take the performance lead once again. Enabling Hyper Threading gives the dual Xeon 2.4 a 10% performance advantage over the DP Athlon MP 2100+ system.

The move to dual 2100+ CPUs results in a 4% performance gain while the jump to dual 2.4GHz Xeons yields a 9% increase over the previous 2.2GHz parts. If we then look at the salability of these two architectures you'll see that for the 4.1% increase in clock speed per CPU, the overall performance of the 2100+ was improved by 4%. This type of scaling is actually almost identical to what we saw on the Xeon platforms as the 9% increase in clock speed per CPU yielded a 9% increase in the performance of the two CPUs combined.

What's very important to note is that the Athlon MP is able to remain this competitive with a 50% smaller cache than the Xeon processors, we'd expect a Barton based Athlon MP core with a 512KB L2 cache to do even better.

We've already analyzed the single processor performance figures you see here in our first Database Server Comparison article.