Re: Performances with new Intel Core* processors

Good to know.  We have been waiting for performance comparisons on
the new Intel CPUs.

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Arjen van der Meijden wrote:
> On 31-7-2006 17:52, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> > On 7/31/06, Jonathan Ballet <jon@multani.info> wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I've read a lot of mails here saying how good is the Opteron with
> >> PostgreSQL,
> >> and a lot of people seems to recommend it (instead of Xeon).
> >
> > I am a huge fan of the opteron but intel certainly seems to have a
> > winner for workstations. from my research on a per core basis the c2d
> > is a stronger chip with the 4mb cache version but it is unclear which
> > is a better choice for pg on 4 and 8 core platforms.  I have direct
> > personal experience with pg on dual (4 core) and quad (8 core) opteron
> > and the performance is fantastic, especially on 64 bit o/s with > 2gb
> > memory (vs 32 bit xeon).
>
> As far as I know there is no support for more than two Woodcrest
> processors (Core 2 version of the Xeon) in a system. So when using a
> scalable application (like postgresql) and you need more than four
> cores, Opteron is still the only option in the x86 world.
>
> The Woodcrest however is faster than a comparably priced Opteron using
> Postgresql. In a benchmark we did (and have yet to publish) a Woodcrest
> system outperforms a comparable Sun Fire x4200. And even if you'd adjust
> it to a clock-by-clock comparison, Woodcrest would still beat the
> Opteron. If you'd adjust it to a price/performance comparison (I
> configured a HP DL 380G5-system which is similar to what we tested on
> their website), the x4200 would loose as well. Mind you a Opteron 280
> 2.4Ghz or 285 2.6Ghz costs more than a Woodcrest 5150 2.66Ghz or 5160
> 3Ghz (resp.), but the FB-Dimm memory for the Xeons is more expensive
> than the DDR or DDR2 ECC REG memory you need in a Opteron.
>
> > also opteron is 64 bit and mature so i think is a better choice for
> > server platform at the moment, especially for databases.  my mind
> > could be changed but it is too soon right now.  consider how long it
> > took for the opteron to prove itself in the server world.
>
> Intel Woodcrest can do 64-bit as well. As can all recent Xeons. Whether
> Opteron does a better job at 64-bit than a Xeon, I don't know (our test
> was in 64-bit though). I have not seen our Xeon 64-bits production
> servers be any less stable than our Opteron 64-bit servers.
> For a database system, however, processors hardly ever are the main
> bottleneck, are they? So you should probably go for a set of "fast
> processors" from your favorite supplier and focus mainly on lots of
> memory and fast disks. Whether that employs Opterons or Xeon Woodcrest
> (no other Xeons are up to that competition, imho) doesn't really matter.
>
> We'll be publishing the article in the near future, and I'll give a
> pointer to it (even though it will be in Dutch, you can still read the
> graphs).
>
> Best regards,
>
> Arjen van der Meijden
> Tweakers.net
>
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