I just noticed three very recent new TPC-E Benchmark Submissions that I thought were quite interesting. As I have written before, I think the TPC-E OLTP benchmark is a very useful tool for helping to make hardware selection and sizing decisions. It is especially relevant for SQL Server, since all of the submitted results are for SQL Server. For whatever reason, nobody has submitted any Oracle or DB2 results, even though the TPC-E benchmark has been out for about four years.

The first benchmark is for a Futjitsu Primergy RX900 S2 system that comes in with a score of 4555.54 tpsE. This is for an eight socket server, with the 10-core, 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E7-8870 processor. With hyper-threading enabled, this gives you 160 logical processors, along with 2TB of RAM. This is the highest TPC-E score that has been submitted so far. While this is an impressive score, it is not four times the score of the two socket IBM system listed next.

The second benchmark is for an IBM System x3690 X5 system that has a score 0f 1,560.70 tpsE. This is for a two-socket server, with the 10-core, 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E7-2870 processor. With hyper-threading enabled, this gives you 40 logical processors, along with 512GB of RAM. This is essentially the same processor used in the eight socket Futjitsu system above, except that Intel has different SKUs for different socket capacities, (E7-2800 series, E7-4800 series, and E7-8800 series).

The third benchmark is for a HP ProLiant DL380 G7 Server that has a score of 1,284.14 tpsE. This is for a two-socket server, with the six-core, 3.46GHz Intel Xeon X5690 processor. With hyper-threading enabled, this gives you 24 logical processors, along with 192GB of RAM. This system uses the 32nm Westmere-EP, which still gives the best single-threaded OLTP performance due its higher clock speed (on the same basic Westmere architecture).

The table below shows the tpsE score per socket, and tpsE score per logical core for these three systems. It indicates that we don’t see linear scaling as we move from a two-socket system to an eight-socket system, using the new Westmere-EX, Xeon E7 series. It also shows better single-threaded performance for the Westmere-EP Xeon 5600 series (with a higher tpsE per logical core.