Monday, May 21, 2012

Intel Xeon E5-2670 gives 56% higher throughput than Intel Xeon X5670

Intel provided us with a chance to try out the new Intel Xeon E5-2670 in a large cluster set-up to compare it against the previous Intel generation, the Intel Xeon X5670. We compared two similar set-ups for MySQL Cluster with 4 data nodes, each node was configured in a realistic production set-up. With Intel Xeon X5670 we achieved 9.77M reads per second in this set-up and with Intel Xeon E5-2670 we achieved 15.2M reads per second. A healthy 56% speedup.

The speedup comes from three factors. The first factor is that the Intel Xeon E5-2670 have 33% more cores (8 vs. 6). The second factor is that more cores gives us greater flexibility in configuring MySQL Cluster and we can actually configure 50% more threads per data node. The third factor is that each Intel Xeon E5-2670 core is actually faster than the Intel Xeon X5670 cores although they execute on a lower clock frequency.

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