How to Baseline Your Physical SQL Server System - Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware - page 322

Table 10.5 shows examples based on data from the SD Benchmark 2 Tier results
comparing performance between different CPU types. Because some business-critical
databases currently run on Intel Itanium processors on HP Integrity Superdome systems,
we have included an example as part of this comparison.
Table 10.5 SAP SD Benchmark Examples Between Different Processor Types
As you can see from this table, the HP AMD Opteron-based system is only 18% more
powerful, core for core, compared to the HP Itanium system. However, the Cisco Intel
Xeon-based system is more than 2.35 times more powerful, core for core, than the HP
Itanium system. 1 What this also shows is that an Intel Hyper-thread is almost as good as
an AMD core, even with the Intel CPU having a lower clock speed. Based on these
results, we can now compare a percentage of CPU utilization from a baseline taken on
an Itanium system and estimate the expected percentage CPU utilization on an AMD or
Intel-based system. As in these examples, 50% CPU utilization of a single Itanium core
would be approximately 21% CPU utilization on the Intel Xeon E5-2470 core, and
would be approximately 41% CPU utilization on a single AMD Opteron 6386SE core.
This is determined by dividing the CPU utilization of the source system by the relative
performance of the destination system, as shown in the following calculation example:
1 Based on Gartner's RPE2 benchmark results published in March 2013, the latest Intel Xeon E7 family of
processors is about twice as fast as the latest Intel Itanium 9500 series.