Intel Xeon 5500 series

The scores are all relative, with the basic message being that bigger is better, and as with FlamMap involves a huge amount of computation including many floating point operations.

Once again, the X5560 came out on top, but it should be noted that even the E5506's score is highly creditable. Likewise, the low-power L5520 performs admirably here.

POV-Ray is a free software tool for creating 3D graphics. We tested using version 3.7.

It highlights the benefits of multi-core technology and again uses lots of floating point operations and compute-intensive tasks.

Here, the X5560's clock-speed advantage over the X5550 isn't so great, and both the 2.26GHz L5520 and 2.4GHz E5530 are within touching distance. Only the E5506, with its notably smaller 4MB L3 cache, is far behind.

Intel also quotes its own benchmark scores, in tandem with key partners. For example, it claims Fujitsu's Primergy set records in SPECint_rate_base2006 with a score of 240.

On the TPC-C benchmark, it claims the HP ProLiant DL370 G6 "shattered" the previous record with a score of 631,766 tmpC using the Oracle 11g database.

And, using VMmark, Intel claims a number of Xeon 5500 series-based platforms "shattered the previous record by as much as as 150 percent", citing a Dell PowerEdge R710 scoring 23.55@16 tiles.

Conclusion

With the new 5500 series of Xeon processors Intel doesn't appear to have missed any opportunities to improve performance.

Reduced power consumption is also a key feature and tests run in our Xeon 5500-equipped servers show significant reductions in consumption across the board.

This is the biggest architectural change we've seen for some time from Intel. It will continue through the next few years with more developments on the way with features such as support for 16GB DIMMs in the Tylesburg-EP platform expected in 2010.

Nehalem undoubtedly represents the biggest challenge AMD has ever faced in the server processor market.

Author: Dave Mitchell