Comments on: Why You Shouldn’t Use an Intel Xeon Silver Processor for SQL Server

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 16:16:06 +0000

In reply to Dimitrios Fountoukidis. For heavily threaded workloads and for "busy" single-threaded workloads (meaning many concurrent queries), the base clock speed of the processor is far more important than the max turbo speed of the processor. Unless the server is nearly idle from a CPU utilization perspective, you will rarely see anywhere close to the max turbo speed on very many cores.

By: Dimitrios Fountoukidis

Dimitrios Fountoukidis — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 11:57:53 +0000

I think that although the outcome is correct, the calculations are not the required, to say. To my opinion, everything goes down to the base and max frequency ratio of both CPU’s, i.e. the first ratio is 58% better, while the second is 72%. In other words, a given task is performed 58%, at worst, faster on the gold xeon. This means that four (4) cores are not needed in xeon gold and we may deduct the amount annual of 7128 x 4 = 28152$ and add the one time amount of 2925-417 = 2508$, which for three (3) years, say is amount to 28152$ x 3 – 2508$ = 81948$.
Please correct me if am wrong.

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 23:47:26 +0000

In reply to Ted. Actually, you can use your purchased core licenses anyway/anywhere you want. There is no restriction such as you describe. On a bare metal system, you must license ALL of the physical cores that are present in the machine, even if you have disabled cores in the BIOS (which some machines let you do).

By: Ted

Ted — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 23:25:52 +0000

Glenn, please forgive my ignorance, but I have a question about this:
“Another alternative would be to have just one Intel Xeon Gold 6244 processor in a two-socket system…”

I thought I read in the licensing literature somewhere that a two-pack core license SKU covered two sockets. In other words, the two-pack core license SKU covers one core per socket. Is that not the case? Can you apply a two-pack core license to a single processor? I hope that makes sense. Thanks for an excellent post.