Intel released the Nehalem processor family. The Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series family. This could be the nail in the coffin for AMD. I hope not. Without competition, Intel can rest on its laurels.
Lets look at the goodies. On Glenn Berry’s blog, he points out the SQL specific benchmarks. This comes from the Anandtech benchmarks. This is what caught my eye from that review.
The memory controller has up to three channels. A dual CPU configuration has access to 35GB/s of memory bandwidth (measured with stream) if you use DDR3-1333. The latest dual Opteron achieves 19.4GB/s with DDR2-800
Think about it. If you have a SQL box with 32GB of RAM and a VLDB, you could theoretically churn the buffer pool once every second. Of course, you will probably hit a disk bottleneck first. In addition the the proc specific improvements, DDR3 with NUMA support in a server is a huge leap.
Today, HP also introduced the DL3X0 G6. Here is a link to the the DL 360 G6 specs. I am speculating but I bet it would beat a dual socket 6 core DL 580 G5. Most definitely on IO bound workloads like a database server. Hopefully, the DL580 G6’s are coming soon. Maybe an 8 socket DL 780 G6. :)
Mix that with VMWare ESX 4.0 that is in RC and virtualization of the database server may have come of age.
The Opteron 1up’ed Intel in 2004. Now the ball is back in AMD’s court. I am rooting for you!
posted @ Tuesday, March 31, 2009 11:44 AM by David Stein
posted @ Friday, May 08, 2009 10:57 AM by Glenn Berry
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