BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

another datapoint of Woodcrest burning lots-o-watts

Friday Nov 17, 2006

Surprised that a 32GB 2-processor Woodcrest server draws a hefty 510 watts. Woodcrest vendors need to be transparent... it will get out. A recent internet search found that even Intel knows a 10GB 1 socket Woodcrest draws 400 watts, see page 3 of www.intel.com/it/pdf/energy-efficient-perf-for-the-data-center.pdf.

Woodcrest vendors need to publish configuration, performance and watts all together whenever they show performance! No more games.

System 8GB 10GB 16GB 32GB
Woodcrest 330 watts 2-socket 400 watts 1-socket 430 watts 2-socket 510 watts 2-socket
Disk Config 1x150GB 7200 rpm SATA disk disk one 73GB 15K rpm SAS (disk idle) just 2 SATA HDDs
Source: Intel disclosed intel whitepaper Sun measured www.c0t0d0s0.org posting

Sun publishes benchmark performance and watts on Sun Fire T2000(~330 watts) and the Sun Fire T1000(~185 watts), performance, and configuration on all of its benchmarks http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/benchmarks.jsp.

  • 330 watts 32GB Sun Fire T2000
    • 32GB; 4 x 73GB 10K rpm SAS disks, 3 Northstar NICs, Crystal FCAL
    • 32GB T2000 has 100 less watts and twice the memory of the 16GB Woodcrest config
    • measured by Sun, CPUs busy, network busy, disks idle
  • 185 watts 16GB Sun Fire T1000
    • Measured on every T2000/T1000 benchmark

Woodcrest 16GB 430 watt measured config details:

    Dell 2950
    2 x 3GHz Woodcrest Xeon 5160 (4MB L2 cache)
    16GB = 8 x 2GB DIMM;
    one 73GB 15K rpm SAS (disk idle)
    1.333MHz FSB
    PERC 5/i, x6 Backplane Integrated Controller Card
    QLogic 2462 Dual Channel 4GB Optical FC HBA PCI-E
    OS: SuSE - SLES
    all bios settings correct

If you have a woodcrest measure the watts and post them, clearly wastecrest vendors don't want you to know.

Seems the Intel likes to use marketing spin and avoid the facts: http://www.intel.com/business/bss/infrastructure/enterprise/power_thermal.pdf and http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/ppw.htm
Also http://www.principledtechnologies.com/clients/reports/Intel/WSPECint_rate_0506.pdf

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