Good DATallegro/Intel white paper
I really like this short white paper, which carries the personal byline of Stuart Frost. Stuart is DATallegro’s CEO, and also the guy who does analyst relations for them (at least in my case). Part of it just does a concise job of spelling out some of the DATallegro story. But the rest is about the comparison between Intel’s new dual-core “Woodcrest” Xeons and their single-core predecessors. Not only does it give credible statistics, it gives understanding of the reasons behind them.
The basic figures are about 2.3X performance and about 1.1X power consumption. Better performance comes from two sources: Doubling the number of cores (duh), and changing the memory design. The latter underscores a point that arose in my research on memory-centric data management: It’s not just raw CPU speed that’s important. At least for database processing, memory speeds, memory bus speeds, etc. are increasingly significant. (Or maybe they always were this significant, and I just didn’t realize it before.)
When I wrote recently of my belief that Intel is making a comeback, this DATallegro evidence was a big part of what I was thinking of.
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[…] In line with the praise I gave earlier for one of their white papers, an unusually clear brief technology overview may be found on DATallegro’s website here. […]
[…] And of course this dovetails with a point I noted in another thread – DBMS are (or need to become) increasingly aware of chip architecture details as well. • • • […]