SPECjbb2005 results from the Intel Tigerton launch
Henrik Stahl's Blog |
September 6, 2007 12:41 AM
|
Comments (2)
Sept 27: added link to the Tigerton result on www.spec.org, updated disclaimer.
Intel repainted the x86 landscape last year when they introduced their new Core microarchitecture. However, these
chips have only been available for single and dual processor systems, while users that needed four (or more)
processors have had to settle with systems based on the older Netburst architecture. This is changing with the
imminent launch of Tigerton, which is a quad-core Xeon MP chip based on the Core architecture. We have been working
with Intel (press release) and Fujitsu Siemens (press release) on tuning and benchmarking for this system with the following results.
Summary:
1) 2 - 2.5 times faster than previous generation x86 systems from Intel & AMD
2) compares favorably with (presumably more expensive) big iron systems based on IBM Power, Sun SPARC and Itanium
The results shown are the total system throughput, measured in SPECjbb2005 bops, and throughput per socket and per core.
The latter is a good indication of single-thread performance.
As we can see, the new RX600 S4 system based on Tigerton is almost exactly 2x faster than the 3.4 GHz Xeon 7140M (codename Tulsa). This boost comes from doubling the number of cores per chip,
as well as a per-core performance that is slightly better than Tulsa, which is a nice feat given that the frequency is ~15% lower.
Comparing to AMD, it is around 2.5x faster than current generation Opterons. It remains to be seen if their
upcoming Barcelona can compete on this benchmark.
This comparison shows that Tigerton is a match for much bigger systems based on SPARC and Itanium, as well as similarly
sized systems based on the new IBM Power6 chip. One caveat here is that big iron systems can scale much higher than x86,
especially Itanium which is available in configurations as big as 512 CPUs (1024 cores) in a single system image(!)
Q & A
What's your interest in this result?
We have been working with Intel and Fujitsu-Siemens on producing this benchmark score and are proud over
the good result.
What difference does the JVM do? Isn't the comparison unfair if you don't use the same JVM?
If you're a frequent reader of my blog you may remember that JRockit is approximately 20-30% better on x86 on this benchmark than the latest Sun JVM,
see this blog entry for details. However, that doesn't affect this comparison to any great extent since all x86
results were based on JRockit (but slightly different versions). Of the big iron results, the Itanium publication was with JRockit while the Sun and IBM
scores are based on their own respective JVMs, presumably optimized for their own platforms.
What does this result mean?
If we assume that SPECjbb2005 is a reasonable indicator of Java performance, this means that the new Intel Tigerton
is the most powerful x86 server for Java today.
What would you use this hardware for?
Using it for a single large Java application is certainly possible, but the application will have to be well-written
to not have scalability issues with 16 cores. It's probably more reasonable to use it to run several small Java applications.
Intel suggests that it is a good platform for virtualization (server consolidation). I agree, and suggest that
you take a look at WLS Virtual Edition if you're interested in this.
Can you show us the full benchmark details?
Sure, here is a summary; follow the links for full information:
Fujitsu-Siemens PRIMERGY RX600 S4 based on 4-chip/16-core Intel Xeon X7350 437,412 bops @ 54,677 bops/JVM
4-chip/8-core Intel Xeon 7140M 217,344 bops @ 54,334 bops/JVM
4-chip/8-core AMD Opteron 8222SE 176,909 bops @ 44,227 bops/JVM
16-chip/32-core Sun SPARC64 VI (2.4 GHz) 440,207 bops @ 27,513 bops/JVM
16-chip/32-core Intel Itanium 2 (1.6 GHz) 471,030 bops @ 58,879 bops/JVM
4-chip/8-core IBM Power6 (4.7 GHz) 346,742 bops @ 86,686 bops/JVM
Fine print: Competetive scores quoted above reflect results published on http://www.spec.org as of September 27, 2007. All scores are
in SPECjbb2005 bops. For the latest SPECjbb2005 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005.
SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjbb2005 are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
See also Real World Technologies' excellent technical summary on Tigerton.
Posted by: hstahl on September 8, 2007 at 11:26 PM
-
Thank you for your blog... do you know of any analysis, or have any person comments, comparing a single intel quad core vs two dual cores, running weblogic, or such?
Thanks
Keith
Posted by: ekwiatek on November 30, 2007 at 7:05 AM
|
