These are both incredible scores for a four-socket system, both for the actual raw score and from a score per physical core perspective. Both of these tested systems have actual TPC-E scores that rival an eight-socket system with the previous generation 32nm Intel Xeon E7-4870 Westmere-EX processor, while their single-threaded performance (as measured by the TPC-E score divided by the number of physical cores) is also relatively close to what we see in the latest 22nm Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 Ivy Bridge-EP processors. This gives you the possibility of eight-socket capacity, with close to modern two-socket single-threaded performance in a four-socket server.

Table 1: Recent IBM TPC-E Benchmark scores

As you can see from Table 1, the Intel Xeon E7-4890 v2 processor is a huge improvement over the previous Intel Xeon E7-4870 processor, with much higher overall capacity and higher single-threaded performance. You also get much higher memory capacity and PCI-E 3.0 support with the new processor.

On the negative side, your SQL Server 2012/2014 core license costs will be 50% higher if you go with the high-end 15-core E7-4890 v2 processor. One alternative would be to use the 12-core, Xeon E7-4860 v2 processor or even the ten-core, Xeon E7-4830 v2 processor to minimize your SQL Server 2012/2014 license costs. One slight problem with that strategy is that the base and turbo clock speeds are lower in the lower core-count processors in the Xeon E7-48xx v2 product family, since they don’t have lower core count, “frequency-optimized” models like the Xeon E5-26xx v2 product family does.

Four-socket systems with these new processors are going to be much faster and have much more total load capacity than previous four-socket systems with the older Westmere-Ex processor.

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These E7 processors also use much lower base and turbo clock speeds than current Xeon E5 v2 processors, which also hurts their single-threaded processor performance. They do have higher overall concurrent load capacity due to higher total memory capacity and more total processor cores, but the individual processor cores in most four-socket servers have been much slower than what you find in a modern two-socket server. Simply put, bigger servers are not faster servers. It is like comparing an eighteen wheeler truck to a Tesla Model S.

Now, that old assessment is going to change somewhat, with the release of the 22nm Intel Xeon E7 Processor v2 Family (Ivy Bridge-EX), and new model servers from the major server vendors that have even higher memory capacity, PCI-E 3.0 support, and 12Gbps SAS/SATA support, along with much faster RAID controllers. These processors are a substantial improvement over the previous generation 32nm Intel Xeon E7 processors (Westmere-EX) that have been available since early 2011.

It will still be possible to configure a new two-socket server, such as a Dell PowerEdge R720, with an appropriate 22nm Intel Xeon E5-2600 Processor v2 Family (Ivy Bridge-EP) processor that will have better single-threaded performance than a new four-socket server such as a Dell PowerEdge R920, but the gap will not be nearly as large as it once was.

The actual good news here for a database professional is the fact that you will be able to have a four-socket server that has as much load capacity as a previous generation, eight-socket server, that also performs nearly as well as a current two-socket server, while paying 25% less for your SQL Server 2012/2014 license costs (compared to a previous generation eight-socket server). This is a pretty big gift from Intel!

A more pessimistic view is that your SQL Server 2012/2014 license costs could rise by 50% as you move from an existing server equipped with four, ten-core Xeon E7-4870 processors (with a total of forty physical cores) to a new server with four, fifteen-core Xeon E7-4890 v2 processors (with a total of of sixty physical cores). For reasons known only to Intel, the lower core count SKUs in the Xeon E7-48xx v2 product family are not “frequency optimized”, meaning they do not have higher clock speeds than the high-end, E7-4890 v2 processor. The base and turbo clock speeds of the best lower core-count SKUs in the E7- 48xx v2 family actually drop off pretty quickly as the core counts go down. The shared-L3 cache sizes also drop off very quickly, as does the processor price, as you can see in Table 1.

Table 1: Selected Intel E7-48xx v2 Processors

With the Xeon E4-48xx v2 product family, you are going to want to choose either the E7-4890 v2 or the E7-4860 v2 model processors in most situations, since the lower core count processors are giving up a substantial amount of performance due to their lower clock speeds and smaller L3 cache sizes. If you really want to reduce your core counts to reduce your SQL Server 2012/2014 license costs, you would be better off with the Intel Xeon E5-26xx v2 product family processors that are used in two socket servers. Another alternative is the upcoming Intel Xeon E5-46xx v2 product family processors that are used in four-socket servers.

Either of those choices would be better than one of the lower core count processors in the E7-48xx v2 product family, at least from a pure processor performance perspective.

Intel also has refreshed the E7-88xx v2 product family that is meant for eight-socket and larger servers. For some reason (probably for HPC use), Intel does have “frequency-optimized”, lower core-count models in this product family, as you can see in Table 2.

Table 2: Selected Intel E7-88xx v2 Processors

I could see some scenarios where you might want to get an eight-socket server with the six-core E7-8893 v2, so that you could have the same physical core count, while having double the memory capacity and much better single-threaded processor performance than a four-socket server with the twelve-core E7-4860 v2. The hardware cost would be significantly higher, since you would be buying eight processors for $6,841.00 each instead of four processors at $3,838.00 each, but for many organizations, that would not be a major issue.

Some server vendors may offer the Xeon E7-88xx v2 processors in their four-socket server models, since they are pin-compatible, which would give us a lot more flexibility as far as processor selection goes. I really wish Intel had “frequency-optimized” models in their Xeon E7-48xx v2 product family, to make this even easier.

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