BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Big Memory used on benchmarks (Xeon, Opteron, IBM Power)

Friday Sep 28, 2007

Large memory is used on many of the standard benchmarks on systems using Xeon, Opteron, and IBM Power. Actually this is fine, Sun systems can and do use large memory as well.

However, given the fact that memory can draw much more power than CPUs and that every system implementation is different (memory types: DDR2, FB-Dimms, very different ASICs) we really need power to be measured at these memory configurations. I have seen to many wattages only specifying TDP of a single processor, and far too many system wattage claims based on 2GB or 4GB of low-speed memory. We need the vendors to specify measured system wattages on configurations that they benchmark.

Price. Another common thing done by many vendors is to show the online prices for slow GHz and small memory configurations as their starting price. If you look at getting the latest GHz CPU and memory sizes like listed below, I've seen prices explode to 4 times to 10 times more than their starting price! Dear.

This suggests we should really list systems by memory size first and then processor count. Processor count is mattering less than memory size for watts & price.

SPECweb2005:
64GB: HP DL580 G5 (4 quad-core Xeon 2.933GHz)
64GB: HP DL585 G2 (4 dual-core Opteron 3GHz)
32GB: HP DL380 G5 (2 quad-core Xeon 2.66GHz)

SAP-SD 2-Tier ECC6.0:
48GB: HP rx6600 (4 dual-core Itanium2 1.6GHz)
32GB: HP DL380 (2 quad-core Xeon 3GHz)
32GB: HP BL685c (4 dual-core Opteron 3GHz)
32GB: HP BL460c (2 quad-core Xeon 3GHz)
32GB: IBM p570 (2 dual-core Power6 4.7GHz)

SPECjbb2005:
32GB: Dell PE6950 (4 dual-core Opteron 2.8GHz)

SPECjAppServer2004:
32GB: HP rx6600 (4 dual-core Itanium2 1.6GHz)

Lotus:
32GB: IBM p550Q (2 quad-core Power5+ 1.5GHz)

Disclosure Statement (all data as of Sept 27, 2007)

SPEC, SPECjbb, SPECjAppServer, SPECweb, reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, Info on www.spec.org. NotesBench Domino[R] R6iNotes, more info www.notesbench.org. Two-tier SAP Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 2004/2005 application benchmark: SAP, R/3, mySAP reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info www.sap.com/benchmark.

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Posted at 02:12PM Sep 28, 2007 in Competitor Follies
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Sun also does the same thing. Charging outrageous prices for the high end configurations

Posted by anonymous on October 04, 2007 at 08:08 AM PDT #

Actually the memory chip vendors charge a lot for memory, and that gets passed on. But at least here is data that fights what many have said to me that X64 & IBM power doesn't need large memory. Simply not true.

Posted by BM Seer on October 04, 2007 at 02:37 PM PDT #

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