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@tweakers.net] Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 1:25 AM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Cc: mmarion@qualcomm.com Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] Speed comparisons... amd64 vs em64t? On Tuesday 21 September 2004 20:00, mmarion@qualcomm.com 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 -- Check the List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe For additional commands, email: suse-amd64-help@suse.com