Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (278 mails)

["Pettini, Don" <don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kees,

	It really depends what you want scenario you would like to
benchmark.  If you are looking at processor instruction attributes,
there are benchmarks like linpack or SPEC which are a good reference for
those in the scientific computing community.  Others that want to look
at total system performance look to TPC (Transaction Processing
Council), www.tpc.org, to look at a bounded, real-world TP environment.
This benchmark is far larger than you would probably consider but all
the rules, documentation, procedure and audit requirements were
necessary to removing the marketing hype from what is a quantitative
exercise.  If you look at TPC though, you can see they created a few
variations to show different common workloads:

	TPC-C is the OLTP workload
	TPC-H is an ad-hoc query workload
	TPC-R is a Report generation workload
 	TPC-W web based transaction workload.

	Remember that the folks who design these
systems/processors/compilers have also had their eyes open to what
benchmarks are out these and I remember in days of Digital's 64 bit
Alpha chip, system cache size was would make x benchmark work best.  You
only have to take a look at the present Itanium 2 MP processor line with
3, 4, or 6MB L3 cache variants.  Manufacturer compilers use to recognize
code for standard benchmarks and inline hand optimized routines to speed
their platform over another.  That is why GNU is a great equalizer.  

	Lastly, consider most people will by AMD or Intel based system,
not processor.  Operations that read and update utilize paths in and out
of the processor that are tens, hundreds and evens thousands of times
slower when doing an I/O.  Some benchmarks can exploit HyperTransport's
duplex advantage, while others minimize the advantages of NUMA versus
non-NUMA architectures.  Some specific benchmarks can look at cache
hotspots in a multiprocessor environment and cache coherency issues
(which limits the ability to scale in a linear fashion).  These
benchmarks will become much more interesting with the release of AMD and
Intel multi-core chips.  


	BTW:  If you would like to look at Opteron benchmarks, AMD has
assembled the most a page of them at:
 
http://www.amd.com/usen/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8796_880
0,00.html

Don

	



-----Original Message-----
From: Kees Hoekzema [mailto:kees@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 1:25 AM
To: suse-amd64@xxxxxxxx
Cc: mmarion@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] Speed comparisons... amd64 vs em64t?

On Tuesday 21 September 2004 20:00, mmarion@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Does anyone else have any decent comparisons of more real-world apps
(not
> just synthetic benchmarks) between differing 64bit archs, especially
> opteron vs Intel? 
I currently have an 3.0GHz Xeon (w/ em64t), a 3.6Ghz xeon (w/ em64t) and
some 
dual opterons (244,248, maybe 250 too). Those are for reviewing.

First I want to compare MySQL benchmarks, using both 32 and 64 bits
binaries 
and a mysql compiled from source with gcc 3.4.x. The benchmark will
consist 
of a copy of our database and running a script that does some real-life 
queries on it with different concurrency levels. Secondly i want to
compare 
webserver performance, apache 2.x w/ dynamic PHP scripts and tux for
static 
files, lets see which platform is the best webserver. 
Alternativly I want to time some comilations (how fast can they compile
a 
vanilla kernel 10 times etc, useless but a nice comparison ;)).

> Would love to see more application comparisons though.

If you have any more idea's of real-world benchmarks, please say so, and
i'll 
try to get them tested too and post the results back to the list.

Ultimatly I want to put together a series of (public available)
real-world 
benchmarks which I want to run on quite some platforms to get a nice
overview 
of speed improvements.

- kees

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