topic Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC in Operating System - HP-UX

Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Alan Casey — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:42:22 GMT

Hi,

I am looking for more comparison information on the performance of ITANIUM2 VS RISC processors. So far I have found the info on Intel
http://www.intel.com/performance/server/itanium2/risc/hpcprice.htm

And have some data from spec.org

Has anyone any more info to share?
We are trying to compare:

Mid range: HP rx7640 VS Proliant DL 380

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Dennis Handly — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:48:40 GMT

A Proliant DL 380 is a CISC processor.

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:49:50 GMT

Shalom,

I always thought that the Proliant's were CISC, not RISC processors.

You may have to piece this together yourself.

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/erc/cache/49203-0-0-14-121.aspx?Keywords=&TopCategories=1552&SearchType=S&ERL=true

http://www.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/standards/fileothumbredirect.jsp?&im_dbkey=40185&icg_dbkey=841

The two systems are aimed at different market segments, little head to head competition has been done.

The Intel data is marketing fluff but matches in general what I've seen. There are limits to how far a single DL380 can be scaled up.

SEP

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Alan Casey — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:52:31 GMT

Sorry sorry, you're right

I meant
rx7640 VS rp7400

We are also concidering the proliant unfortunitely

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Hein van den Heuvel — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:15:34 GMT

I like to use the SAP results and TPC results
www.sap.com/benchmark --> sd 2 tier
www.tpc.org

I discussed this before in:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1075677
and
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=580677

hth,
Hein van den Heuvel
HvdH Performance Consulting

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Steve Lewis — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:41:05 GMT

It partly depends on what you want it for.

I use Itanium2 (Montecito) to run my databases. The performance of a 1.6Ghz It2 (18Mb cache) completely blows away a 1Ghz PA8900.

BUT, that may also be due to the new SX2000 cell boards in my rx8640, which shift the data to/from memory at an incredible speed.
Some people report a 25% increase in speed from the SX2000 cell boards alone, for the same processor.

Intel report the Itanium2 as their fastest server processor. The EPIC architecture with the extra bit in the instruction word for branch prediction hints really helps prevent pipeline stalls. It just requires you to compile/link with high optimisation.

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:49:13 GMT

Oh,

The rx7640 is much faster and will run circles around an rp7400.

HP has released its last dual core PA-RISC chips unless they make a dramatic policy reversal.

If your applications will tolerate itanium,then thats where the performance will be coming from.

SEP

Re: Performance benchmarks Itanium Vs RISC

rick jones — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:44:01 GMT

The rx7640 will iirc also hold much more ram than the DL380, and can get to 16 cores with dual-core processor chips where the dl380 will presently top-out at 8 cores with quad-core chips (I am assuming the new quads are available in some form of DL380 but do not know that for a fact).

It will also have far more I/O slots (~16 vs ~4 IIRC) and probably higher aggregate I/O bandwidth.