Attack Of The Killer Akanes

Still waiting to hear back from SoftLayer sales - apparently they're swamped with orders for the new servers.

Meanwhile, doing a bit of poking around.  The SpecInt 2006 score for the Xeon 5520 - the CPUs we'll have in the new server - is 27.9.  That's in a SuperMicro system, exactly what we'll be using.  The score for the Core i7 920 I was using for comparison is 28.6, so we won't be far short of that.  The score for our current Xeon 3220 is 20.3.  No scores yet for the Xeon 3520, which is what I'd planned to upgrade to, but it should be similar to the 920, because it's the exact same chip.

So I'm pleased and a little surprised by that.

Floating point is 32.0 for the 5520 vs. 19.0 for the 3220.  And 29.3 for the 920...  Odd.  Maybe a new compiler revision?  Too lazy right now to read the detailed test reports.

For SpecIntRate (the multi-threaded version), the score is 202 for the 5520 vs. 59.2 for the 3220 and 109 for the 920.

And finally SpecFPRate is 160 for the 5520, 42.2 for the 3220, and 78.9 for the 920.

So the new server will be three times as fast as the old servers (but it will replace two and a half servers), and have three times the memory (and will replace three servers worth of memory).  It will be cheaper, easier to manage, more robust, and more expandable - I can take it to 48GB of memory if needed, where all three of the current servers are full.

No room for extra disks, though, unless I go for a 2U model, but that costs...  Huh.  That's not that much more expensive at all, and comes with redundant power supplies, and 18 DIMM slots and 12 drive bays (instead of 12 and 4).  That's definitely worth considering.

Intel will be releasing 6-core versions of the new Xeons in the next 12 months, so that will get us up to 24 virtual cores, 72GB of memory, and 12 disks.

That should do.  Yes, I think that should do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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