First pass Barcelona test results coming next; get your explanations and disclaimers here
I’ve got the rough first-pass performance numbers in hand. They’re quite voluminous, so I need to cut them down before I can post them. While I’m waiting for this huge file to load into my HTML editor, I’ll set the stage for the tests and the results. I plan to run SPECjbb, STREAM, and after a delay to get them compiled with the latest rev of Intel’s compilers, SPECint_rate and SPECfp_rate. For burn-in, I used a shareware app called SiSoft Sandra, and I re-ran that application overnight to get its full performance report. I’m a benchmark snob, and as such I have to warn that until I prove them out with standardized tests, Sandra’s report results have to be taken with a grain of salt of approximately one foot in diameter. Sandra is built to test desktop machines, and in the past, I’ve used it purely for burn-in and to make sure that systems under test aren’t hobbled by poor BIOS defaults. Sandra’s code and its methods are opaque, so I don’t trust it to produce meaningfully comparable results for servers. I’m passing along only that raw data that a patient reader can interpret; analysis will follow the results… READ MORE