AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison

With all of the excitement surrounding last week's launch of the Thoroughbred core, who wants to talk about 0.18-micron CPUs anymore? Unfortunately for those who follow the server market, they are generally not the first to receive the brand new CPUs. Instead AMD and Intel like to focus their new architectures and technologies on the mobile and desktop fronts first and eventually transition them to the server world when it makes sense.

The reason for this is simple; in the server world the stakes are much higher and thus the processors must be rigorously tested (or validated) under much more strenuous conditions. The processors must also be validated in multiprocessor configurations, taking up even more time. It's for this reason that there's a noticeable lag between the release of a desktop Athlon XP processor and its identically clocked MP counterpart.

In the past AMD committed to a 1-month differential between the launch of an XP part and its MP counterpart, but as you can already guess it has been more than a month since the release of the Athlon XP 2100+. For whatever reason it has taken three months for the Athlon MP 2100+ to become available, and you can guess that the performance boost offered by the 66MHz clock speed increase isn't really noticeable. To top things off, this is still a 0.18-micron part and thus ends up being AMD's hottest running server CPU that's currently available.

Although there's not much to get excited about the new MP release, we decided to take this opportunity to update our database server comparison benchmarks with the fastest CPUs from both camps.