Review: Opteron for Servers

Test setup

We installed the latest Version of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for x86, aka: SLES8, with all three systems. The Nuremberg company was kind enough to supply us with the "gold code" of its Opteron version of SLES8 for the Newisys machine. Like the 64-Bit-CPU itself this version is available since April 22. This setup enables testing with identical 32 bit environments and a nearly source-identical 64-Bit-OS. The Xeon machines by Dell and IBM are tested with their stock 2,4or 2,8 GHz CPUs. As an additional look in the future we also plugged two of the brand new Xeons at 3,06 GHz into the IBM x255.

The benchmarks were chosen from a range of open sourced test suites that measure performance under medium and high load conditions. Unixbench is a port of the fairly familiar "Byte"-benchmark. We selected six SMP enabled tests from this suite. dbench derives from the toolbox of the Samba developers. Using scripted real-world network data, it simulates the load of a high number of clients accessing the servers file system. lmbench is used to do some basic system bandwidth measurements. To evaluate the performance under high loads in a multiuser environment we use the "Suite VII", part of the AIM benchmarks by SCO.

All these benchmarks are compiled with the target machines. The AIM tests here require some minor polishing of the code to run flawlessly. We further remove all hard disk specific tests from the benchmark suites to compensate for the different storage systems of the machines reviewed. Dell's PowerEdge 4600 brings double the memory of the two other machines. We therefore limit the OS to use only 2 Gbytes of memory by using the appropriate Linux kernel boot parameter. Before every run we reboot the machines to free memory and file system from left-overs of the last benchmark.