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To: Gopher Broke who wrote (72737)	2/28/2002 10:59:19 AM
From: milan0	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

re: infoworld.com First, note that the system used is a dual processor one: "When booting to Windows 2000 or XP on our state-of-the-art Supermicro P4DC6 dual-Xeon DP test bed, we found that the OS was completely fooled by the virtualization scheme. Windows Device Manager dutifully reported the presence of four 2GHz Xeon CPUs, despite the fact that the system sported just two physical processors." Also, the comparison between HTh and no HTh was done using a switch in BIOS: " when serving SQL transaction data to a series of Windows 2000-based clients, our hyperthreading-enabled Xeon DP test bed delivered round-trip throughput an average of 46 percent faster than the same system with hyperthreading disabled (a simple BIOS switch controls the feature)." Now, which 'switch' is that? I doubt that the BIOS has a switch for HTh, something like: Hyperthreading On/Off since the BIOS itself is fooled into seeing 4 processors. Would it not be rather something like: Multiprocessor On/Off...? In that case, would not the comparison be between 1processor vs (2 real processors + 2 virtual processors)? Would that not explain the surprising scores? Mike

To: Gopher Broke who wrote (72737)	2/28/2002 11:02:54 AM
From: Elmer	Respond to of 275872

It doesn't seem right for them to just disable hyperthreading for the comparison system. Who knows what performance penalty that gives to a core that is designed to be hyperthreading. No doubt AMD has a prestonia, cracked it open and already knows it's the same die as NorthWood. For example, their "averages" are taken over a range of number of connected users, yet the benefit of hyperthreading decreases with more users. How many systems do you know of where the performance goes up with more users? What happens to an XP system when you add more users? Whould you like a free performance improvement? Why on earth do this averaging? Why are you fixated on averaging? They posted all the data and you can see it all for yourself. And why do they stop at 50 clients for the database test? I would expect the numbers for 75 and 100 clients to be equally interesting/significant. That kind of a system would probably call for a large L2 version. It's expected shortly. It'll be interesting to see the benchmarks for that one. EP

To: Gopher Broke who wrote (72737)	2/28/2002 11:07:23 AM
From: milan0	Respond to of 275872

re: infoworld.com First, note that the system used is a dual processor one: "When booting to Windows 2000 or XP on our state-of-the-art Supermicro P4DC6 dual-Xeon DP test bed, we found that the OS was completely fooled by the virtualization scheme. Windows Device Manager dutifully reported the presence of four 2GHz Xeon CPUs, despite the fact that the system sported just two physical processors." Also, the comparison between HTh and no HTh was done using a switch in BIOS: " when serving SQL transaction data to a series of Windows 2000-based clients, our hyperthreading-enabled Xeon DP test bed delivered round-trip throughput an average of 46 percent faster than the same system with hyperthreading disabled (a simple BIOS switch controls the feature)." Now, which 'switch' is that? I doubt that the BIOS has a switch for HTh, something like: Hyperthreading On/Off since the BIOS itself is fooled into seeing 4 processors. Would it not be rather something like: Multiprocessor On/Off...? In that case, would not the comparison be between 1 processor vs (2 real processors + 2 virtual processors)? Would that not explain the surprising scores? Mike

To: Gopher Broke who wrote (72737)	2/28/2002 11:10:59 AM
From: milan0	Respond to of 275872

EDIT: sorry for the dual post re: infoworld.com First, note that the system used is a dual processor one: "When booting to Windows 2000 or XP on our state-of-the-art Supermicro P4DC6 dual-Xeon DP test bed, we found that the OS was completely fooled by the virtualization scheme. Windows Device Manager dutifully reported the presence of four 2GHz Xeon CPUs, despite the fact that the system sported just two physical processors." Also, the comparison between HTh and no HTh was done using a switch in BIOS: " when serving SQL transaction data to a series of Windows 2000-based clients, our hyperthreading-enabled Xeon DP test bed delivered round-trip throughput an average of 46 percent faster than the same system with hyperthreading disabled (a simple BIOS switch controls the feature)." Now, which 'switch' is that? I doubt that the BIOS has a switch for HTh, something like: Hyperthreading On/Off since the BIOS itself is fooled into seeing 4 processors. Would it not be rather something like: Multiprocessor On/Off...? In that case, would not the comparison be between 1 processor vs (2 real processors + 2 virtual processors)? Would that not explain the surprising scores? Mike