We ran a set of tests to see the performance of the server and got some really amazing results. But before we talk about the tests, results, and performance of the server, let's first understand what is this new processor 'Harpertown' all about.
What is Harpertown?
Intel is even planning to launch a dual core version of the CPU with a similar architecture which will be codenamed as Wolfdale and will be available with frequency ranging from 1.89 to 3.4 GHz. In simple terms Harpertown is a better, faster, and more energy efficient quad core processor if compared against Clovertown (the current quadcore based Xeon CPUs). The key difference is in the L2 cache, bus speed, and power consumption. For a detailed comparison have a look at the table. Harpertown is supposed to replace Clovertown in the near future.
To test the Harpertown in our test labs we ran benchmarks such as Linpack, SunGard, and Netbench and our own developed BZip2 benchmark. We ran these tests on multiple OSs such as CentOS 5 and Windows Longhorn Server RC0. The setup was pretty much simple. We took the server as it is and only changed the RAM in some cases. The only configuration made was a RAID 0 array of the two hard disks to get the best possible read-write performance from the 5400 series server.
Test 1: Running Longhorn
While installing Longhorn we really got surprised as the complete installation of Longhorn took less than 10 minutes which generally takes around half an hour on a core 2 duo extreme machine. We also gave a try to Longhorn's new hypervisor on Harpertown and it worked marvelously with full virtualization support. We were able to run seven dedicated guest systems on the hypervisor.
Test 2: Linpack A server testing without Linpack doesn't make any sense. But this time instead of running Linpack on a stripped down installation of OS with minimum service running, we decided to run it on top of a full blown Longhorn installation itself. We did this to see how much of actual performance a user will be achieving while using Harpertown on a production environment with an OS such as Longhorn.
With a bit of tweaking in the Linpack input file we were able to achieve around 65 Giga Flops in no time. This result is till now the best performance result we have got out of any server. The closest performer to this score was the Connoisseur Skyrunner which was a dual Clovertown 3.2 GHz based server which gave us around 53 Giga flops of floating point operations.
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