System setup and notes
Hardware
| System | Tigerton - 4 socket | Clovertown - 2 socket | Kentsfield - 1 socket | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | 4 x Intel Xeon X7350 (2.93GHz, 4 x 8MiB L2 cache, 1066FSB, Socket 604) 4 x Intel Xeon L7345 (1.86GHz, 4 x 8MiB L2 cache, 1066FSB, Socket 604) |
2 x Intel Xeon X5365 (3.0GHz, 2 x 8MiB L2 cache, 1333FSB, LGA771) | Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 overclocked to 3GHz (3.0GHz, 8MiB L2 cache, 1333FSB, LGA775) | |
| Motherboards | Intel S7000FC4UR | Intel S5000XVN | ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe | |
| Chipsets | Intel 7300 | Intel 5000X | Intel 975X + ICH7R | |
| Memory | 16 x 2GiB Samsung FB-DIMMs | 4 x 1GiB Micron FB-DIMMs | 2 x 1GiB Corsair TwinX XMS-8505 DDR-2 | |
| Memory timings and speed | 5-5-5-11, 667MHz | 5-5-5-11, 667MHz | 4-4-4-12, 833MHz | |
| Graphics card(s) | ATI ES1000 | ATI FireGL V3200 128MiB | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 36GB SAS (ST936701SS) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||
| Optical drive(s) | Optiarc DDU801A | Sony DW-Q30A | ||
| BIOS revision | SFC4UR.86B.01.00.0013.061520071458 (15/06/2007) | S5000.86B.06.00.0076.040920070751 (09/04/2007) | 2206 (21/08/2007) | |
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.3.0.1013 | |||
| Graphics driver | Standard VGA Graphics Adapter | |||
| Operating system | Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition R2, 64-bit with Service Pack 2 | |||
| PSU | 2 x 1570W Redundant Delta Power Supplies | PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W CrossFire | ||
| Monitor | Acer AL1916W | |||
Software
| 2D Benchmarks | SiSoftware Sandra XII LITE CPU Arithmetic SiSoftware Sandra XII LITE CPU Multi-media SiSoftware Sandra XII LITE Memory Latency POV-Ray 32-bit 3.7.0 BETA 21 - Internal benchmark mode CINEBENCH R9.5 CINEBENCH R10 Quest Benchmark Factory - Scalable Hardware - SQL Server 2005 |
|---|
Testing notes
Due to the highly parallel nature of the Caneland platform, combined with the lack of support for PCIe 16x cards, only a small subset of our normal test suite was used. But we did carry out additional benchmarks specifically to examine the multi-threaded performance scaling.
[advert]To further explore the effects of multi-threading, testing was carried out using Intel's single-socket and dual-socket quad-core processors - both at 3GHz. This allowed us to examine how the performance scales with additional cores in four and eight-core systems and see if any obvious bottlenecks are appearing on the Caneland platform.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to obtain an AMD Quad-core Opteron Barcelona system in time for this article but you can be certain that we will be examining AMD's new architecture at some point in the future.
