Monday, May 22, 2017

Oracle SuperCluster M7 SLOB LIO Tests vs Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4

Here are some SLOB LIO figures from a DB zone configured with 16 threads running on an Oracle SuperCluster M7 hardware. For comparison I've also included numbers from an Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4 CPU.

It makes sense to mention that this is not exactly a fair comparison -- a single SPARC M7 core has 8 threads associated with it so my zone is able to utilize a total of two SPARC M7 cores (16 threads total with 8 threads per core). E5-2699 V4 is currently top of the line Intel CPU core packed model with 22 cores. So we're comparing two SPARC M7 cores vs 16 E5-2699 cores. It does however help answer the question -- if you're running on a certain number of Intel cores what kind of performance can you expect when you move over to a heavy threaded M7 if you transfer your workload "as is"?

Below are the results:



The first thing worth mentioning is that M7 still exhibits a large deficit when it comes to single threaded performance -- a single SPARC M7 thread is about 60% performance compared to an E5-2699 V4 core (which is not even a top bin CPU when it comes to frequency). Throughput is a different story -- two M7 cores are almost able to match four E5-2699 V4 cores thanks to a heavily threaded design.