Eight Core Servers: Opteron 880 (Egypt) vs. Xeon MP 3.0 GHz (Paxville)

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We take a look at the Quad Dual-Core Enterprise platforms, comparing Intel's Paxville (Xeon MP) 3.0GHz with AMD's Opteron 880 in a series of 64-bit database tests. Many of you will notice that we've finally transitioned our benchmark platform to 64-bit. It's been a long road getting there; we were constantly trying out builds of SQL 2005 64-bit as it was in development, and had mixed results. The final build produced viable numbers, and we've fully transitioned to SQL 2005 for all future benchmarks.

Our goal throughout the tests was a constant CPU usage of 80-90%; we didn't want to reach the point of system saturation, nor did we want the systems to have too many idle cycles. Each test was first verified and then run 3 times. The standard deviation for the tests is 3-4%. We then averaged the set of three runs to produce the final result.

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