Message-ID: <cc3fd8e85f9e3b1c3f48b5dfb3333dee.squirrel@society.servebeer.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2013 09:33:49 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: POWER vs Intel for DB loads
From: "Rich Jesse" <rjoralist2@society.servebeer.com>
To: oracle-l@freelists.org
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Reply-To: rjoralist2@society.servebeer.com

Hey all,

We're currently running our production 11.2 DBs on POWER6 (P550) and will be
replacing the server soon.  From what I've been able to gather, the raw
single-threaded "throughput" improvement in the POWER7+ (P750) is around
25%-30%.  Yes, I'm fully aware of the fallacies of marketing numbers.

One of my concerns with staying with POWER is the per-core licensing cost of
the DB.  I'm looking to (hopefully) double the number of cores for the new
server, so of course, I'd like to see how a set of Intel Xeons (model TBD)
under Oracle Linux could compare.

I understand that until we have the hardware here for me to actually apply
our workloads, I won't really know.  But timelines being what they are,
there is no time for trials, so we need to make our best informed decision
now.  One caveat is that the vast majority of our workload is (for now)
concurrent single-threaded transactions, both on the DB and the app server. 
I would think that we should benefit more from CPUs with faster cores
instead of more cores, considering economics (licensing) as part of queueing
(thanks, Cary!).

Summary:  Single-threaded DB performance of POWER7+ vs Intel Xeon?

Sorry that there's a ton of info from the decision-making process that's
missing here.  I don't think many would appreciate a 200KB post...  :)

Thanks!
Rich

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