Today, I am going to talk about the existing Intel Westmere-EX processor family. Instead of this processor series being called the Intel Xeon 7600 series (as was originally expected by some), it is called the Intel Xeon E7 series, with separate model numbers for two socket, four socket and eight socket servers. This includes the [...]
Glenn Berry
Semi-random musings about SQL Server performance
A SQL Server Hardware Tidbit a Day – Day 3
Posted on: April 3, 2013 1:40 pm
What is the Difference Between Physical Sockets, Physical Cores, and Logical Cores?
Posted on: March 25, 2013 3:32 pm
I witnessed an interesting conversation on Twitter today where someone was talking about how he uses the terms sockets and cores interchangeably, since everyone else does, or words to that effect. This made me think that there may still be some confusion about how these terms are used and what they mean in relation to [...]
Two New TPC-E Submissions for SQL Server 2012
Posted on: November 29, 2012 11:47 am
Just when I was not looking, two new official TPC-E results have been posted in the last week. IBM has a 3218.46 TPC-E score for an IBM System x3850 X5 that has four Intel Xeon E7-4870 processors, while HP has an 1881.76 TPC-E score for an HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 system with two Intel Xeon [...]
Deciding What Processor to Choose for SQL Server 2012
Posted on: November 11, 2012 6:26 pm
If you have read my SQL Server Hardware book, watched my Understanding Server Hardware course on Pluralsight or ever heard me speak at a conference, you are probably aware of my very strong advocacy for modern, two-socket Intel-based database servers for many database server workloads. I make this argument because of the excellent single-threaded processor [...]
Memory Error Recovery in SQL Server 2012
Posted on: August 21, 2012 1:46 pm
One under publicized new feature in SQL Server 2012 is called Memory Error Recovery. This feature allows SQL Server 2012 to repair clean pages in the buffer pool by reading the pages again from disk. These “soft” errors are caused by electrical or magnetic interference inside a server that cause single bits inside of DRAM [...]
