AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on April 21, 2005 9:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Data Warehouse Test
We are always looking to improve the quality of our reviews and as a result, we have added a new Stress Test to our suite.This "Data Warehouse" test is focused on large record sets with plenty of aggregation. This test is based on a system that we developed to track and manage Request statistics for www.AnandTech.com and Forums.AnandTech.com. It tracks statistics like Requests/Hour, Requests/Hour/IP Address, Unique IP Addresses/Hour, Unique Users/Hour, Daily Browser stats, etc. These stats are further summarized by site, i.e. www or Forums.
As with the other Stress Tests, each test was repeated three times and the average between the three tests was used. For this Data Warehouse Stress Test, we defined a quantity of work to complete and measured how long each platform required to process the workload.
So, to ensure that IO was not the bottleneck, each test was started with a database, including tempdb, which had already been expanded so that autogrow activity did not occur during the test. During the execution of the tests, there were no applications running on the server or monitoring software. Task Manager, Profiler, and Performance Monitor were used when establishing the baseline for the test, but never during execution of the tests.
At the beginning of each platform, the server was rebooted to ensure a clean and consistent environment. The database was always copied to the 8 disk RAID 0 array with no other files present to ensure that file placement and fragmentation were consistent between runs. In between each of the three tests, the database was deleted, the original database was copied again to the array, and SQL Server was restarted.
There is no "client" required for this test. The workload is initiated by a stored procedure call from Query Analyzer.
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patrick0 - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
If they would have the dual-core in stores in June, I would buy one, but this isn't the case, so I'll buy San-Diego 4000+.I'll upgrade when quad-core will be out.
Barneyk - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
oh, you cant edit your comments...Anyway, im really excited about this development of computing, not having good multitasking ability feels so outdated, i've been crying about that for years, and fianlly its here...
Well, almost, and its probably another year before i can afford it, but still... :)
Barneyk - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
testjvarszegi - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
Again, the lack of technical superiority of AT's "experts" is obvious. On SQL Server, you're not supposed to prepend stored-procedure names with "sp_", as it introduces a performance penalty. This is basic knowledge. Some have remarked before on how their .NET "experts" code like, um, transplanted ColdFusion "experts". :)Visual - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link
a minor error: on page 12 right above the graph it says "The Dual Opteron 252's lead by 19% over the closest Xeon, which was the Quad Xeon 3.6 GHz 667MHz FSB" but the slowest xeon is the 3.3 GHz one.mechBgon - Saturday, April 23, 2005 - link
Zebo... hehe, yep :Djustly - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
An outstanding article about AMDs duel core, just what I would expect from Anandtech (to bad I had to go to techreport.com to read it).Zebo - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
Hahaha makes Chetta's drool: Looks just like you MECH.:)MACKTEK - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
I appreciate the article but am disappointed by the misleading title... AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview. The 939 is not equal to 940. Also, the article clearly saysCOMPARE ATHLON 64 X2... right on the 1st page. In fact the article does not admit to "not having a real x2" until page 13. I love reading anandtech's articles and visit frequently... Perhaps a better title would have been... Preview of Athlon64 X2 using an Opteron CPU.
mechBgon - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/mechBgon/drool.jpg#82 says "and corporate PCs could work perfectly and more with a K5-K6/P2-P3."
Ahhh, this again. You obviously haven't worked with a fully-armed installation of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i. *evil grin* Hope you enjoyed your stay in 1999... welcome to 2005.
;)