We were quite amazed, even slightly suspicious, when HP and Fujitsu-Siemens Published their SAP numbers. These numbers showed that the newest Xeon X5570 (Nehalem EP) series offer an enormous performance boost over the Xeon X5470 (Harpertown). After all, an almost 100% improvement at a slightly lower speed (2.93 GHz vs 3.3 GHz) is nothing short of amazing. Turns out that the real clockspeed is 3.2 GHz (2.93 GHz + 266 MHz turbo) but that does not alter the fact that these are truly incredible performance numbers.

I can now confirm that there are no tricks behind these numbers: they paint the right picture about the Xeon Nehalem EP. Talking to SAP benchmarking specialists, it became clear that few tuning tricks exist that are not know to the big OEM. The benchmark has been analyzed and tuned so well, that even the use of a different database (for example MS SQL instead of DB2) only makes a 2 to 3% difference most of the time. So you might even compare SAP numbers which are obtained on different databases. To resume, the SAP numbers can only be really boosted by better hardware (CPU-memory).

Now why I am talking so much about SAP benchmarking numbers? It is not like the expensive ERP software is run by everyone.

Well, the SAP numbers are showing a dual 2.93 GHz (or 3.2 GHz) Xeon beating the only quad AMD 8384 (Shanghai at 2.7 GHz) score of 22000 we have so far. Granted, a blade server is most of the time a bit slower. But four AMD 8384 2.7 GHz will be in the same league as a dual Xeon X5570, which will be out very soon now.

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=554