Demystifying Hardware - SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting - page 50

system that has a score of 671.35 tpsE. Just looking at these raw scores, you could be relatively
coni dent that you could replace the old four-socket system with that new two-socket system and
see better performance with more scalability headroom. You should also drill into the actual
TPC-E submissions to better understand the details of each system that was tested. For each
tested system, you want to know things such as operating system version, SQL Server version,
the amount of RAM in the database server, the initial database size, the type of storage, and the
number of spindles. All of this gives you a better idea of the validity of the comparison between
the two systems.
When assessing the relative OLTP performance of different processors, take the raw TPC-E tpsE
score for a system using the processor and divide it by the number of physical cores in the system to
get an idea of the relative “per physical core performance.” Using the preceding example, the pro-
posed new two-socket Xeon E5-2670 system would have 16 physical cores. Taking your adjusted
score of 1676 and dividing by 16 would give you a i gure of 104.75. The old four-socket Xeon
X7460 system has 24 physical cores, so taking the actual raw score of 671.35 and dividing it by 24
gives you a i gure of 27.97, which is a pretty dramatic difference between the two processors for
single-threaded OLTP performance.
Geekbench Benchmark
Geekbench is a cross-platform, synthetic benchmark tool from a company called Primate Labs. It
offers a rather comprehensive set of benchmarks designed to measure the processor and memory
performance of a system, whether it is a laptop or a multi-processor database server. There is no
measurement of I/O performance in this benchmark. One convenient feature of Geekbench is that
there are no coni guration options to worry about. You simply install it and run it, and within about
three minutes you will see the scores for the system you have tested. These are broken down into
an overall Geekbench score and a number of scores for processor and memory performance. This
is very useful for comparing the relative processor and memory performance of different processors
and different model servers that may be coni gured in a variety of ways.
This test can be a very reliable and useful gauge of processor and memory performance. Thousands
of Geekbench score reports have been submitted to the online Geekbench database, which is avail-
able at http://browser.primatelabs.com . It is highly likely that you can i nd a score in their
database for nearly any processor or model server that you want to compare. This is very handy,
especially if you don't have a large dedicated testing lab with a lot of different model servers and
processors.
For example, suppose you have an older Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with two Intel Xeon E5440
processors and 32GB of RAM. It turns out that a system like this has a Geekbench score of
around 7950. You are trying to justify the purchase of a new Dell PowerEdge R720 server with
two Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors and 128GB of RAM, and you discover a result in the online
database that shows a Geekbench score of about 41,000. That's a rather dramatic increase com-
pared to a score of 7950. Using Geekbench scores in conjunction with TPC-E scores is a fairly
reliable way to compare relative processor and memory performance, especially for OLTP
workloads. Using these two benchmarks together is a very useful technique that will likely serve
you well.