Now the latest craze is PCIe. For example, the Tyan S2895 has 3 HT (6.4GB/s) connections used for I/O. #1 has PCIe x16 (8GB) + GigE, #2 has PCIe x16 + GigE + SATA + IDE, #3 has PCI-X 133 (1GB) + PCI-X 100 (.75GB) + PCI. If you could find the right cards to max out the system, we're looking at 14+ GB/s of I/O. Unfortunately, the PCIe SCSI RAID controller selection is pretty sparse right now. There's a PCIe x8 (4GB/s) card from Intel but it's only has 2 U320 channels so it's way underutilizing the available bandwidth.
As for why financial/insurance institutions use IBMs or Suns -- I would suggest limited choice is a bigger issue than any specific sub-system performance factor. A nationwide bank doesn't have any choice except to pick a monster 100+ processor machine because anything slower couldn't handle their 20,000 employees. Not many options really. Plus, people in big companies tend to make safe decisions -- get the company with the most name value so you don't get fired if the machine turns out to be a lemon.
Uwe C. Schroeder wrote:
Well, you overlook one thing there. SUN has always has a really good I/O performance - something far from negligible for a database application.
A lot of the PC systems lack that kind of I/O thruput.
Just compare a simple P4 with ATAPI drives to the same P4 with 320 SCSI drives - the speed difference, particularly using any *nix, is surprisingly significant and easily visible with the bare eye.
There is a reason why a lot of the financial/insurance institutions (having a lot of transactions in their DB applications) use either IBM mainframes or SUN E10k's :-)
Personally I think a weaker processor with top of the line I/O will perform better for DB apps than the fastest processor with crappy I/O.
i guess the "my $0.02" is in order here :-)
UC
On Saturday 23 April 2005 01:06, William Yu wrote:
Looked on AMD's website. 132 for 4x875 on Windows, 126 on Linux. (Probably Intel compiler on Windows, gcc on Linux.) That gets AMD into the $100K 16+ processor Sun system area in terms of performance. Of course, Sun still has a crapload of other uptime/reliability features built-in to their systems.
William Yu wrote:
The numbers don't have the latest dual core Opterons yet. (Don't see them on spec.org yet either.) My random guess right now, 4x2 system would probably be about 140 SpecINT_rate. It's looking like it's faster than have a DC Opteron w/ 1 memory bank versus Dual Opteron w/ 2 memory bank because the interconnect between cores inside a DC CPU is so much faster than the HT motherboard connect.
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