Xeon 2.8GHz DP & 2.0GHz MP - Part I: Taking over the Enterprise

AnandTech Web DB Performance 4X Load 996MB DB (Transactions per Second - Higher is Better) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz 2-way AMD Athlon MP 2200+ 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 1620.2 1339.1 1163.5 966.6 918.7 772.0 752.2 | 0 | 324 | 648 | 972 | 1296 | 1620 | 1944

The first thing you'll notice is that the spread increases noticeably as we increase the load level.

Hyper-Threading gets a chance to make much more of an impact here, where the 2-way Xeon MP with Hyper-Threading enabled can outperform the 2-way Xeon DP with HT disabled. Enabling Hyper-Threading increased performance by 28% on the 2-way Xeon MP and by 26% on the 2-way Xeon DP. Neither of those performance gains was enough to beat out the raw power of having four CPUs, but even on the 4-way setup HT was able to increase performance by 20%.

The move from 2 processors to 4 extends to 67% and the performance advantage of the 4-way Xeon MP over the 2-way Xeon DP extends to 39%. Once again we see that the 2-way Xeon MP's 2MB L3 cache isn't able to overcome the 40% clock speed advantage over the 2-way Xeon DP.