AnandTech published Intel Woodcrest preview benchmarks which have some numbers for MySQL as well.
From these numbers performance looks great and it looks like finally Intel has something to respond to AMD Opterons on Server market. Now competition heats up and we’ll see what AMD will have to respond. As Opteron did not have serious updates for a while I guess there is something on a way.
Same site publishes Core vs K8 architecture comparison which is very interesting reading.
This article also looks at performance of Irwindale based Xeon and Sun T2000. Results are close to the ones I had in MySQL Performance Landscape presentation – neither of them was match to Opteron performance in MySQL workloads. As benchmark used in this article is very different from what I used I guess it is rather general situation.
Few words about P4 architecture. It is very interesting to see in most benchmarks Woodcrest at 3 Ghz beats Irwindale at 3.6 Ghz up to 3 times , which means performance per clock cycle is back where it should be. With P4 architecture it looks like increasing frequency was the main goal. Possibly marketing thought in peoples mind frequency is what defines performance. No one measures their CPU with SpecInt results or something like that. This strategy however could not work well with cores and hypperthreading as you need people to understand you want to pay more for multiple cores and threads, not only for Ghz. Also AMD with their using “Comparison Rank” rather than true frequency tricked people. Also with Server market this did not work as well as these are bought by more savvy people who had always better understanding of Frequency != Performance.
My expectation for performance per clock cycle was – it should be increasing with each new CPU family, This was true for 286,386,486,Pentium, Pentinum Pro/Pentium II but it failed for Pentium 4. Performance per clock cycle could be 1.5-1.7 times worse than PIII. Ie I remember being very surprised to find P4-2.0 Ghz runs just 30% faster than my PIII-1.0Ghz system. From preview Woodcrest seems to match my expectation for new processor family.
This article also has very interesting observation on MySQL Multiple CPU scalability . As you can see MySQL could be slower on Linux with many connections with increasing number of CPUs. This is known bug which being worked on. However it looks like it is not the case with Solaris. The scalability is not perfect but at least there is gain not loss from increasing number of CPUs. This makes me think this is not only MySQL but also Linux what has the problem. I had similar results in my tests and now happy to see these can be confirmed.
A bit of disclosure. As you could read in the article I was working with article authors advising them how to tune MySQL and what is the reason for negative scalability etc.
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