Re: Performance comparison Alpha ES40 vs Itanium rx3600

Steve Thompson wrote:
On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Syltrem wrote:

How can I compare the performance of an Alpha ES40 with 4-833Mhz CPUs to an
Integrity rx3600 with 2-1.4Ghz CPUs ?
[...]

My own workload is completely different (not Oracle), so this won't apply
to you directly. On total compute throughput, however, I would expect the
Alpha to be slightly quicker, although not by much (it has twice as many
CPU's). The I/O subsystem may be the key for you.

I inferred that Integrity rx3600 configuration to include two Intel Itanium 1.4 MHz processors, which is four cores. Though you're right, that could certainly be read as one Itanium processor and two cores...

This whole "cores" stuff is, well, a somewhat bogus distinction. The innards of the SMP implementation has never been highlighted to this degree before, and there have been cases where there were two processors on one board in the AlphaServer line, and two processors in one socket in the Integrity line. Multicore has engineering and cost advantages; it's a way to provide SMP with lower hardware costs. But it's SMP.

Hyperthreading, now that's different...



.