Re: These results confirm that SAS customers can achieve new levels of performance on Intel-based Windows systems
Or, instead of new levels of SAS performance, they can achieve high levels of SAS performance with AMD's Dual Processor platform:
Over the years we’ve all read about how certain benchmarks have become the “defacto” standard by which most of us base our buying decisions. This year we decided to buy 2 similarly configured workstations (Dell dual Intel 2ghz vs A2Z dual AMD MP1800) and generate our own test/results.
Depending on the outcome, we would re-evaluate our purchasing decisions for hardware procurement. The primary usage of these workstations will be statistical analysis, a very CPU intensive job. Before I disclose our unbiased results, I need to emphasize our objective was to find the fastest machine (ie: quickest completion times).
We bought the Dell workstation first,assuming it would fair extremely well and the second workstation was custom-built by A2Z to my specifications. The dataset tested was a 3.5gig flat file.
Dell Specs: Dual 2ghz Xeon processors, 1 gig RDRAM, (1) 40gig IDE 7200rpm drive for loading the OS and various software, (2) SCSI Ultra160 drives to hold the data: one SCSI drive for reading the data, the other for writing, to eliminate any I/O contention. Software: Windows2000 Professional, SAS v8.1
A2Z Specs: Dual MP1800 AMD processors, 1 gig DDR RAM, (1) 40gig IDE 7200rpm drive for loading the OS and various software, (2) WD 100gig 7200rpm IDE drives to hold the data: one IDE drive for reading the data, the other for writing, to eliminate any I/O contention. Software: Windows2000 Professional, SAS v8.1
Note: Even though the Dell system had a two SCSI drives advantage, the I/O channels were unobstructed on both system, therefore didn’t impact the result. We could prove this by monitoring the CPU time vs Real Time, both nearly identical.
Results: Dell completion time = 2hr37minutes. A2Z completion time = 1hr42minutes. We ran these tests several times to validate our findings and every test reinforced our initial finding that the AMD system we had built was significantly faster than a comparably configured Dell/Intel system.
Congratulation A2Z and AMD!
Kevin Shea
a2zcomp.com |
