HP's 2-way Opteron server

HP ProLiant DL145 looks somewhat similar to the IBM eServer 325, and Sun
Sunfire v20z, and Appro, and Newisys, and ... .

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/.../11910_div.HTML

Yousuf Khan

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Oops, nearly forgot about 4-way server too.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/...l585/index.html

Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message
news:R_K_b.1953$Qg7.1232@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...
> HP ProLiant DL145 looks somewhat similar to the IBM eServer 325, and Sun
> Sunfire v20z, and Appro, and Newisys, and ... .
>
> http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/.../11910_div.HTML
>
> Yousuf Khan
>
> --
> Humans: contact me at ykhan at rogers dot com
> Spambots: just send mail to above address ;-)
>
>
>

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 16:30:41 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>HP ProLiant DL145 looks somewhat similar to the IBM eServer 325, and Sun
>Sunfire v20z, and Appro, and Newisys, and ... .
>
>http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/.../11910_div.HTML

Seems similar only in that they're all 1U dual processor Opteron
servers. There just aren't that many differences possible in such a
design! However the actual setup does look somewhat unique, ie it's
not exactly identical to someone else's box (for comparison, Sun's 1U
Opteron box is exactly the same as a Newisys box, IBM's is exactly the
same as an MSI box, and Appro seems to sell one of everyone's setup).

Specs on the HP machines look a tiny bit more limited than some of the
others though. The IBM system has hot-swapable drive bays and 2 PCI-X
slots as compared to HP's non-hot-swap drive bays and only a single
PCI-X slot. The Newisys/Sun machines not only have the two PCI-X
slots and hot-swap drive bays but also their built-in system
management processor. Of course, price seems to reflect these
differences, with the HP systems being a reasonable amount cheaper
than the IBM systems, while Sun is the most expensive of the lot.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

I find it interesting that HP chose to develop these AMD-based
systems when they probably knew that Intel planned to announce
their own AMD64-combatible CPUs in the immediate future. What,
if anything, does this say about the current state of the grand
HP/Intel alliance and IPF?

G.

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:20:53 -0000, gavin@allegro.com (Gavin Scott)
wrote:

>I find it interesting that HP chose to develop these AMD-based
>systems when they probably knew that Intel planned to announce
>their own AMD64-combatible CPUs in the immediate future. What,
>if anything, does this say about the current state of the grand
>HP/Intel alliance and IPF?

Maybe purely practical reasons? After all, Intel did say they aren't
going to enable those 64bitness for quite a while yet. It make sense
for HP to sell Opterons for half a year before switching to Prescott,
or offering them side by side.
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Hi Gavin Scott,

> I find it interesting that HP chose to develop these AMD-based systems
> when they probably knew that Intel planned to announce their own
> AMD64-compatible CPUs in the immediate future. What, if anything, does
> this say about the current state of the grand HP/Intel alliance and IPF?

It can't be helping that HP's own benchmarketing shows their single CPU
AMD Opteron server is faster than their dual Intel Xeon server:
<http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/benchmarks/dl145-webbench.pdf>

Regards,
Adam

Adam Warner wrote:

> Hi Gavin Scott,
>
>
>>I find it interesting that HP chose to develop these AMD-based systems
>>when they probably knew that Intel planned to announce their own
>>AMD64-compatible CPUs in the immediate future. What, if anything, does
>>this say about the current state of the grand HP/Intel alliance and IPF?
>
>
> It can't be helping that HP's own benchmarketing shows their single CPU
> AMD Opteron server is faster than their dual Intel Xeon server:
> <http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/benchmarks/dl145-webbench.pdf>
>

Even being the Opty fanboy that I am, when someone publishes
benchmarks showing that a single Opty 248 beating a 3.2 GHz
Xeon dualie the first word that comes to mind is "bullsh*t".

Sure, you can undoubtedly find some meaningless test where
you will get results like that, but otherwise those kinds
of results need to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:36:40 -0600, Rob Stow <rob.stow@sasktel.net>
wrote:
>Adam Warner wrote:
>> It can't be helping that HP's own benchmarketing shows their single CPU
>> AMD Opteron server is faster than their dual Intel Xeon server:
>> <http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/benchmarks/dl145-webbench.pdf>
>>
>
>Even being the Opty fanboy that I am, when someone publishes
>benchmarks showing that a single Opty 248 beating a 3.2 GHz
>Xeon dualie the first word that comes to mind is "bullsh*t".
>
>Sure, you can undoubtedly find some meaningless test where
>you will get results like that, but otherwise those kinds
>of results need to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

It's not so much a meaningless test as one that doesn't scale very
well to multiple processors, particularly with the Xeons shared memory
architecture. The Xeon system only saw a 28% performance gain going
from one to two processors. Also, it shouldn't come as that big of a
surprise that the Opteron is strong here, the chip has consistently
outpaced the Xeon by large margins in basically all web server testing
I've seen. The combination of the integrated memory controller and
tons of low-latency/high-bandwidth I/O from hypertransport seems to be
a real winning combination for this sort of work.

In any case, you can find more info about WebBench here:

http://www.etestinglabs.com/benchma...nch/default.asp

It's a bit of an all-encompassing web server test. HP doesn't break
down the individual client scores, just lists the two overall scores.
It's possible that the Opteron just did REALLY one in one test and
that was enough to push it's scores up overall.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

Rob Stow <rob.stow@sasktel.net> wrote in message news:<103s0paraoemc4c@corp.supernews.com>...
> Adam Warner wrote:
> Even being the Opty fanboy that I am, when someone publishes
> benchmarks showing that a single Opty 248 beating a 3.2 GHz
> Xeon dualie the first word that comes to mind is "bullsh*t".

There is this thing called memory latency. Opteron has a lot
less of it with the on-chip memory controller than Zeon does
with the frontside bus.

Mitch

Mitch Alsup wrote:

> Rob Stow <rob.stow@sasktel.net> wrote in message news:<103s0paraoemc4c@corp.supernews.com>...
>
>>Adam Warner wrote:
>>Even being the Opty fanboy that I am, when someone publishes
>>benchmarks showing that a single Opty 248 beating a 3.2 GHz
>>Xeon dualie the first word that comes to mind is "bullsh*t".
>
>
> There is this thing called memory latency. Opteron has a lot
> less of it with the on-chip memory controller than Zeon does
> with the frontside bus.
>

I'm well aware of that. However, that conveys an advantage
that typically lets an Opty dualie beat out a Xeon dualie that
has a 50% higher cpu clock. This particular benchmark had
a single 2.2 GHz Opty beating - by a huge margin - a 3.2 GHz
Xeon dualie. I suspect the result was reported incorrectly -
it probably should have been a dualie vs dualie result.