Somewhat unnoticed during the holiday season, HP has submitted a new TPC-E benchmark for the DL385 G7 two socket database server, equipped with two 32nm 2.6GHz AMD Opteron 6282SE processors. This system, with 256GB of RAM and 84 spindles (in two Violin Memory Systems V3205 Flash Memory arrays), comes in with a 1,232.84 TpsE score.
This score is roughly comparable to an older score of 1284.14 TpsE for an HP DL380 G7 two socket database server, equipped with two 32nm 3.46GHz Intel Xeon X5690 processors, 192GB of RAM, and 84 spindles.
The AMD Opteron 6282SE has 16 physical cores, so that a two socket system will have 32 physical cores. The Intel Xeon X5690 has six physical cores (plus hyper-threading), so a two socket system will have 12 physical cores or 24 logical cores with hyper-threading enabled.
This is very grim news for AMD with the upcoming core-based licensing in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition, which would make the SQL Server 2012 core licenses for the DL385 G7 system cost 2.66 times as much as for the DL380 G7 system. That will be a pretty hard sell to justify that much extra in licensing costs, for no extra performance or scalability.
Filed under: Microsoft, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Tagged: AMD, TPC-E 
