L3000 vs. N4000

[ROSS HANSON]

Hello
We have a N4000 (rp7400) which has four 440MHz
cpus and a L3000 which has four 750Mhz cpus

We will be getting rid of one of them shortly but, I was wondering if, due to the chips used on both system which one would perform better.

They both have about the same amount of memory and they would be doing alot of logic aynalisis

Does anyone have a opinion?

[Torsten.]

I guess the L-Class is faster, because of the different CPU speed. The internal busses are very similar.

If you are doing the same calculations on both, I would expect you will see which system is faster.

[Ian Vaughan]

Howdy,
I would take a look at how much the 2 systems will cost to support over the next X years. I would imagine that an L-class would be cheaper to support than the N-class.
You might find that for the cost of supporting either of them you can justify a shiny new rp3440 or rx2620?

Just a thought.
HTH
Ian

[SVB]

Seeing how an L3000 is basically an N4000 cut in half (this is not the case for L1000/2000, their architecture is different), and you're only using 4 cpu's on the N-class, my guess is the L3000 will outperform the N-class as it has cpu's that run on a higher frequency.

That's from a hardware point of view though. The points raised about support contracts vs shiney new machines are certainly worth considering.

[Vince Moore]

If expansion is not a real issue then the L3000 is your better performer at 50,000 OLTP while the N4000 runs 27,500 OLTP. Cost of support will be less for the L-box. Either the rp3440 (max 4 cpu) or rx2620 (max 2 cpu) would be a good choice. HP does intend to have the PA-RISC replaced with the Integrity servers so an rx-class server is a better idea to consider. The rp3440 w/4x800MHz runs OLTP at 76,400 or 4x1000MHz at 83,700. The rx2620 w/2x1300MHz runs 59,000 OLTP. Also new systems tend to be less costly to support than the older ones.

[ROSS HANSON]

This machine will become a database server with heavy I/O. By what factor, if anyone knows, would one machine outperform the other?

Also, being the two systems are similar can you take memory from one system and install it into another?

[Vince Moore]

For I/O, the L3000 offers 12 channels: 2 twin-turbo PCI slots at 500 MB/s, 6 turbo PCI slots at 250 MB/s and 4 shared channels at 250 MB/s for a total I/O bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s. The N4000 has 24 channels: 10 twin-turbo at 532 MB/s, 2 turbo at 266 MB/s, and 2 single channels at 480/266 MB/s for a total I/O bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s.