Re: AMD Shanghai versus Intel Nehalem

We have a dual E5540 with 16GB (I think 1066Mhz) memory here, but no AMD
Shanghai. We haven't done PostgreSQL benchmarks yet, but given the
previous experiences, PostgreSQL should be equally faster compared to mysql.

Our databasebenchmark is actually mostly a cpu/memory-benchmark.
Comparing the results of the dual E5540 (2.53Ghz with HT enabled) to a
dual Intel X5355 (2.6Ghz quad core two from 2007), the peek load has
increased from somewhere between 7 and 10 concurrent clients to
somewhere around 25, suggesting better scalable hardware. With the 25
concurrent clients we handled 2.5 times the amount of queries/second
compared to the 7 concurrent client-score for the X5355, both in MySQL
5.0.41. At 7 CC we still had 1.7 times the previous result.

I'm not really sure how the shanghai cpu's compare to those older
X5355's, the AMD's should be faster, but how much?

I've no idea if we get a Shanghai to compare it with, but we will get a
dual X5570 soon on which we'll repeat some of the tests, so that should
at least help a bit with scaling the X5570-results around the world down.

Best regards,

Arjen

On 12-5-2009 20:47 Scott Marlowe wrote:
> Anyone on the list had a chance to benchmark the Nehalem's yet?  I'm
> primarily wondering if their promise of performance from 3 memory
> channels holds up under typical pgsql workloads.  I've been really
> happy with the behavior of my AMD shanghai based server under heavy
> loads, but if the Nehalems much touted performance increase translates
> to pgsql, I'd like to know.
>