New TPC-E Results for SQL Server 2016

There have been two recent TPC-E OLTP benchmark results published for SQL Server 2016. These include one from Fujitsu and one from Lenovo.

The most recent result, from July 12, 2016 is for a four-socket FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX4770 M3 server that is using the latest generation, 14nm 2.2GHz Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 processor (Broadwell-EX), with a TPC-E throughput score of 8,796.42. As is always the case with TPC-E benchmarks, the hardware vendor used the “flagship”, highest core count processor available from the latest processor family, in this case, a 24-core processor. This helps achieve the highest possible TPC-E throughput score (which is a measure of the total processor capacity of the system), at the cost of quite high SQL Server 2016 licensing costs, since you would have to purchase 96 SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition core licenses. This would cost about $684K at full retail price. Fujitsu priced the SQL Server 2016 licenses at $647K in the Executive Summary report.

Another recent result from May 31, 2016 is for a four-socket Lenovo System x3850 X6 that is using the same Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 processor. This system gets a TPC-E throughput score of 9,068.00, which is about 3% higher than the Fujitsu system. Both systems use a 36TB initial database size, while the Fujitsu system uses 2TB of RAM and the Lenovo system uses 4TB of RAM (which is the license limit for Windows Server 2012 R2). Both systems use all flash storage, with 2.5” SAS SSDs.

Unlike the old TPC-C OLTP benchmark, TPC-E does not require an unrealistically expensive storage subsystem to get good scores. As long as the storage subsystem is “good enough” so that it does not become a bottleneck, then the ultimate TPC-E bottleneck becomes processor performance.

Earlier this year, there were two competing results for two-socket systems from Lenovo and Fujitsu. On March 30, 2016, Fujitsu published a result for a two-socket FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX2540 M2 system using the latest generation, 14nm 2.2GHz Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 processor (Broadwell-EP), with a TPC-E throughput score of 4,734.87. The Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 has 22 physical cores, so the two-socket system has a total of 44 physical cores that would need SQL Server 2016 licenses that would cost about $313K at full retail price. Fujitsu priced the SQL Server 2016 licenses at $296K in the Executive Summary report.

On March 24, 2016, Lenovo published a result for a Lenovo System x3650 M5 system using the same Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 processors, with a TPC-E throughput score of 4,938.14, which is about 4% higher than the Fujitsu system. In this case, the Fujitsu system uses 1TB of RAM (with a 19TB initial database size), while the Lenovo system uses 512GB of RAM (with a 20TB initial database size). Both systems use all flash storage, with 2.5” SAS SSDs.

I know that this is a lot of numbers to be throwing around, so a summary of these four systems is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Recent TPC-E Score Highlights

This shows that four-socket Broadwell-EX systems scale relatively well compared to older Xeon E7 processor families, meaning that the drop in single-threaded performance compared to equivalent two-socket Xeon E5 processor families is not as large as it used to be. There is still a gap though, which means that you are losing some scalability as you make the jump from a two-socket system to a four-socket system. If you can split your workload across two database servers, you would be better off to have two, two-socket servers rather than one, four-socket server. You would have more total processor capacity, better single-threaded performance, more PCIe expansion slots and lower SQL Server license costs.

An even better alternative for most people would be to use a lower core count, “frequency optimized” processor, instead of the flagship processor. For example, if you used the eight-core, 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2667 v4 processor in a two-socket server, you would get the estimated results shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Estimated TPC-E Results

If you had four, two-socket systems with the eight-core, 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2667 v4 processor, instead of one, four-socket system with the 24-core 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon E7-8890 v4 processor, you would have about 15.2% more total processor capacity, about 72.9% better single-threaded performance, and a 33.3% lower SQL Server 2016 licensing cost (which would be about $227K in license savings). You would have the same total memory capacity, and more than three times the number of PCIe slots.