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TPC-H at SF300 (Correction 2011-03-03)
From Opteron dual-core to 12-core, and Xeon 7560 8-core
HP TPC-H benchmark reports at SF300 provides excellent history with the Opteron processor, and provides results for both the latest 4-way Opteron and Xeon systems. The first result starts with a 4-way dual-core Opteron, next proceeding to the 8-way quad-core (2.5GHz Barcelona), followed by the faster 2.7GHz Shanghai, then 8-way six-core (2.8GHz Istanbul), and most recently to the 4-way 12-core Magny-Cours. A comparison of the TPC-H 300GB results for the 8-way ProLiant DL785 G6 and the 4-way DL585 G7 is interesting, with the 4-way DL585G7 having 18% better performance on the Power metric.
| System | Processor | Total Cores | Memory | SQL | Power | Throughput | Composite QphH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DL585 | Opt 8220 | 8 | 128 | 5rtm | 25,206.4 | 13,283.8 | 18,298.5 |
| DL785 | Opt 8360 | 32 | 256 | 8rtm | 67,287.4 | 41,526.4 | 52,860.2 |
| DL785 | Opt 8384 | 32 | 256 | 8rtm | 75,161.2 | 44,271.9 | 57,684.7 |
| DL785 G6 | Opt 8439 | 48 | 256 | 8sp1 | 109,067.1 | 76,869.0 | 91,558.2 |
| DL585 G7 | Opt 6176 | 48 | 512 | 8R2 | 129,198.3 | 89,547.7 | 107,561.2 |
| DL580 G7 | Xeon 7560 | 32 | 640 | 8R2 | 152,453.1 | 96,585.4 | 121,345.6 |
The significant differences between the two systems are below. Both system have the same number of total cores, the 8-way with 6-core processors and the 4-way with 12-core processors. The DL785G6 cores are 2.8GHz versus the DL585G7 at 2.3GHz, about a 20% difference. The DL585G7 has twice the memory, 512GB versus the 256GB.
For TPC-H at SF300, and using SQL Server 2008 page compression,
256GB is not quite sufficient to encompass the entire database tables and indexes.
With 512GB, there is more than sufficient memory for data,
indexes and probably most many hash join intermediate results (for minimal moderate tempdb activity)
Without compression, the TPC-H SF300 LineItem table is actually 240-255GB(?) using the new 3-byte Date data type in place of the original 8-byte datetime in 3 columns. With other tables and indexes, the total size might be 420GB?
| System | DL785 | DL785G6 | DL585G7 | DL580 G7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Opteron 8384 | Opteron 8439 | Opteron 6167 | Xeon 7560 |
| Sockets-Cores | 8 x 4 = 32 | 8 x 6 = 48 | 4 x 12 = 48 | 4 x 8 = 32 |
| Frequency | 2.7GHz | 2.8GHz | 2.3GHz | 2.26GHz? |
| Memory | 256GB | 256GB | 512GB | 640GB |
| Storage | 204 HDD | 194 HDD | 4 SSD | |
| Windows Server | 2008 RTM | 2008 EE SP1 | 2008 R2 EE | 2008 R2 EE |
| SQL Server | 2008 RTM | 2008 EE SP1 | 2008 R2 EE | 2008 R2 EE |
That the DL585G7 employs SSD storage is not expected to impact performance, and was probably used for lower cost. The 194 15K HDDs and 12 storage enclosures in the DL785 cost $110K, while the 4 320GB Fusio-IO drives in the DL585 cost $55K. If the DL585 had 256 or less memory, then the SSD storage would have moderately better performance than with HDD storage. Another significant difference are the improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2, several of which have major impact scaling to a high number of processor cores.
When the HP DL580 G7 TPC-H SF 300 report came out, I was confused and thought that perhaps the storage configuration, data and tempdb on 6x10K HDDs was an error. (thanks to EW for pointing out that this is not an error) Apparently, with 640GB memory, there is sufficient memory for data, indexes and the interdiate query results to be kept in memory. So the 6 HDD do not seem to handicap performance for either data or tempdb activity.
The chart below shows the TPC-H power query run times for the DL585G7 relative to the DL785G6.
TPC-H Power query run times, DL585G7 relative to DL785G6
Overall, the DL585G7 with 4 Opteron 6167 is about 20% higher than the DL785G6 with 8 Opteron 8439 processors. For the individual queries, several are moderately faster, 3 are much faster, 5 are about the same, and 3 are actually significantly slower. The DL785 has faster processors, which should make all queries run faster. It is difficult to account for differences in the system architecture, as there may be difference in how the individual dies are connected. The greater memory on the DL585 is expected to make certain queries run faster. The scaling improvements in R2 (OS and SQL) might contribute significant gains in some queries, but may also negative effects in others.
It would be very helpful to have access to the actual execution plans, along with execution statistics to determine if the differences can be attributed plans differences or differences in disk IO.
SF300
SF300 big queries
SF300 middle queries
SF300 small queries