Woodcrest memory lacks an important power-saving feature
Thursday Dec 07, 2006
There are technical reasons why a 32GB 2-processor Woodcrest server draws a hefty 510 watts. Intel decided not to implement the energy saving "page open mode" for the power-hungry FB-DIMMs. So CPU power throttling may have limited benefit on Woodcrest systems.
| 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 |
| Sources: | Intel disclosed | intel whitepaper | Sun measured | www.c0t0d0s0.org posting |
Intel has shown that a 10GB 1 socket Woodcrest draws 400 watts, but you have to dig past some marketing spin to find it, see page 3 of www.intel.com/it/pdf/energy-efficient-perf-for-the-data-center.pdf.
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:
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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
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