Xeon 2.8GHz DP & 2.0GHz MP - Part I: Taking over the Enterprise

AnandTech Ad DB Performance

Next we have the AnandTech Ad DB, which prides itself on being very similar to the Web database in terms of usage pattnerns but much larger in sheer database size. The Ad DB itself is 2.1GB large and obviously the size is multiplied in the load multiplied tests.

AnandTech Ad DB Performance 1X Load 2.1GB DB (Transactions per Second - Higher is Better) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz (Hyper-Threading) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way AMD Athlon MP 2200+ 1054.2 964.1 960.6 929.4 900.5 833.6 778.8 | 0 | 211 | 422 | 633 | 843 | 1054 | 1265

Immediately it becomes clear that this isn't the same sort of load we saw in the last set of tests. The most obvious characteristic of the Ad DB tests is that Hyper-Threading isn't initially very helpful. Granted there is an overall performance increase of around 7% on the 2-way Xeon DP, but for the two Xeon MP platforms the technology does much more harm than good. This could be the work of Hyper-Threading scaling well with clock speed at relatively low loads, which aren't I/O intensive enough to introduce more periods of idle execution.

Both Xeon MPs perform wonderfully in this test, clearly using their large on-die L3 cache to their advantage. It's clear that we're not very CPU bound initially as the 4-way Xeon MP only offers a 10% performance advantage over the 2-way Xeon MP.