Performance impact of the 7410 update

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Performance impact of the 7410 update

Wednesday, September 23. 2009

I mentioned the update of the 7410 hardware in a blog entry yesterday afternoon. Brendan wrote an interesting blog entry about the performance impact with "7410 hardware update, and analyzing the HyperTransport". For cached workloads (to get the disks out of the equation), the increase of performance is really impressive:

Workload	7410 (Barcelona)	7410 (Istanbul)	Improvement
NFSv3 streaming cached read	2.15 Gbytes/sec	2.68 Gbytes/sec	25%
NFSv3 8k read ops/sec	127,143	223,969	75%

What many people forget when talking about Istanbul, is the fact that it didn't get just two additional cores. You get HT3 and HT Assist (a snoop filter to reduce bus contention by processors searching their data in other processors caches) with it. Brendan summarized his findings with:

For this 7410 upgrade, the extra CPU cores help - but it's more about the upgrade to the HyperTransport. HT3 provides 3x the CPU interconnect bandwidth, and dramatically improves the delivered performance of the 7410: from 25% to 75%.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris, Sun/Oracle at 12:20 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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the new machine has more cores and more clock (2.6GHz instead of 2.3)

#1 molli123 (Homepage) on 2009-09-23 14:00 (Reply)

But i don't think this explains the increase of both values alone. The article of Brendan explains why the upgrade to HT3 was important. But you are right ... the 300 MHz are nice ...

#1.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2009-09-23 14:32 (Reply)

Great, I'll wait a bit before purchasing my SS 7310C.

In the latest Fishworks update there is a new device : otoro based on the big X4600 (8 CPUs, 512 GB RAM).

#2 Frédéric V on 2009-09-23 19:04 (Reply)

To get 512GB ram in the X4600M2 would require the use of 8GB DIMMs, which is priced at $500 a DIMM vs $80-100 per 4GB DIMMs.

I am actually eagerly waiting for the 8 Socket Nehalem-EX from Sun which gives you 128 DIMMs, so you can use 4GB DDR3 to get to 512GB, cutting memory cost by 75%-80%, plus you get roughly 3x the CPU performance too.

#2.1 TS on 2009-09-23 22:59 (Reply)

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