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There's been a change near the top of the performance heap for servers here in the CRN Test Center, and the newcomer's name could be your own. Earlier this year, the Enterprise Platform and Services Division of Intel rolled out eight new server platforms, giving white-box solution providers a host of new high-performance options for their purpose-built servers and appliances. And perform they do.
For testing, Intel sent its high-end S2600GZ motherboard, code-named Grizzly Pass, in a 2U rack server chassis with a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2660 eight-core processors running at 2.2GHz with 128 GB of memory. After testers helped it clear a few technical hurdles, the system proceeded to break a performance record that until a week earlier had stood here in the CRN Test Center since February of last year.
To prepare the machine, testers installed the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and set the operating system for maximum performance. Then the 64-bit version of Primate Lab's Geekbench 2.2 was installed, and testers were amazed at the results. With only a minimum hardware-specific drivers installed, Intel's Grizzly Pass motherboard turned in five Geekbench scores in excess of 23,000, with a top score of 23,766.
This was good enough to land the Intel machine in second place, just ahead of the PowerEdge C6145, Dell's dual-node AMD box, which turned in a score of 22,607 with 48 Opteron cores. Intel's box exceeded that score handily with 16-- that’s with two-thirds fewer cores. All tested systems were equipped with processors running at speeds greater than 2GHz.
Dell still holds the record for the fastest server so far to come through our labs with its PowerEdge R720. That screamer broke 30K.
