Considering that between the Xeon X5355 2.66GHz, Xeon 7140 (3.4GHz NetBurst) and the Opteron DC 2.8GHz
the Core 2 based X5355 has the best SPEC CPU 2006 int
for 8 core TPC-C & H results (2xX5355, 4x7140, & 4x Opt)
the 7140 has the best TPC-C (30% over Core2)
the Opteron has the best TPC-H by about 10% over Core2

Considering the TPC-C results aimed at best performance (as opposed to price-performance) typically run at 175-200 IOPS per data disk, then the 528 disks in the X5355 241K TPC-C result is probably on the order of 100K IOPS, at 8KB per IOP, makes for 800MB/s, which is not really heavy for the 5000P chipset.

I am not sure what is limiting in TPC-H, as I do not have a recent generation perfmon log,
but look at the HP ML370G5 result with X5355,
6 P800 SAS RAID controllers, 25 SAS disk on each controller.
You can get about 800MB/sec from a single first gen SAS RAID controller. There was an Intel/LSI Logic press announcement claiming 3GB/s IO from a system with the 5000P chipset. I think the reference system has 1x8 and 3x4 PCI-E slots. The ML370G5 with 6x4 PCI-E might be able to do more.

The new Seaburg chipset is listed as capable of 44 PCI-E (gen 1) lanes, so this could allow for 10 x4 PCI-E slots,
so I think this could benefit TPC-H

It is clear that TPC-C is more influenced by cache size.
Hence the weakest CPU (in terms of SPEC CPU int) had the best TPC-C by a huge amount with the help of the 16M L3,
TPC-C is also helped by HT, which is not a factor in TPC-H or SPEC CPU

Anyways, hopefully we will have published TPC-C & H results this coming week to scrutinize

Marcin Dalecki (martin@dalecki.de) on 11/11/07 wrote:
---------------------------
>For a DB load the cache snoop handling should have no really noticable impact.
>Those loads tend to pin tasks to particular CPUs anyway and tend to be IO bound
>- and there you will gain the most from the huge improvement on PCI throughput availibity.
>Depending on how you stuff your system with IO subsystems this could have an overallimpact
>even on the order of hunderd of percents. And then of course remember that you can staff more RAM in to the system.