To be honest I normally do not care about performance of first in line CPU – it costs much more while offering only marginal improvement compared to second and 3rd model.

Speaking about results… well they say what they compare and they do not claim 3ghz Woodcrest will be faster than Opteron 285.

Keep in mind results were published a while ago and it took a while to prepare so they simply might not have 285 available.

Also what is the most important is to see the giant different from old Xeons. I personally do not care if Opteron or Xeon is faster 5-10 percent. This is something which can be offset by having better deal from vendors. While 40%+ performance difference might be showstopper, not to mention giant power consumption.

of course the 1st in line Xeon is going to beat the 3rd in line for AMD.

Unfortunately these results do not tell much – no one really uses Apache in production on Windows, plus they did not really specify what did they test – was it static html page ? What is really interesting for modern application is dynamic pages.

Not to mention the benchmark description itself looks strange 50.000 users with concurrency of 10. What does this suppose to mean ? The concurrency is number of requests submitted at the same time by apache benchmark, so what is number of users when ?
I suspect it is really number of requests not number of users.

Anyway I will refrain from speculations at this point. Hopefully I will have a chance to benchmark Woodchrest vs Opteron myself soon.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=woodcrest&page=9

A 2.33GHZ Woodcrest 5140 is slower than a 2GHZ low end Opteron 270.

Unlike those review sites which live on ad money, GamePC is a system vendor that sells servers, workstations, desktops and notebooks, both AMD and Intel. In fact. you can pre-order Woodcrest CPUs from GamePC.com. GamePC’s customers include big names such as Dolby, Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, FAA.

LOL!!

Yes the link for DB2 and MySQL benchmark I guess is using different benchmark kit. That one was flawed in respect of MySQL results and I contacted author to explain what was not done well.

The general big problem I have with anadtech results is using publicly unavailable benchmarks for MySQL. So unfortunately noone can validate these numbers.

This particular benchmark is hopefully better. As I mentioned in the article on other data points (old Xeons and Opterons) it corelates very well with our internal results.

Speaking about Innodb degradation – this link just tests it on 1 and 2 CPU this is not when problems typically happen. For most workloads you need more than 4CPUs to see degradation.

Thank you for insightfool comments.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2447&p=5

The earlier review too uses Opterons+Linux+MySQL+InnoDB, the same as this setup used, though versions may differ. Why do you get totally different results sets this time around when moving to dual dual core opteron setup?

See the following analysis

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/06/busting-anandtechs-woodcrest-vs.html