SPARC M12 and S7 CPU comparison using SLOB

Fujitsu SPARC M12 Server

Fujitsu recently announced new SPARC M12 Servers using the SPARC64-XII CPU. This systems hold several performance world records. Check out details at http://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/unix/sparc/key-reports/benchmarks/

But how does this CPU and system scale and how is the performance compared to our own Oracle SPARC S7 Server?

SLOB DB Benchmark

To compare the two systems I setup a SLOB (Silly Little Oracle DB Benchmark) environment.

The SLOB benchmark executes 500'000 SQL select statements (SLOB Ops). The SGA is 20GB is size to make sure all data is in the Database Cache and no physical I/O is required. This way we measure CPU, Memory, OS and DB Performance.

SLOB results

The 12-core SPARC64-XII scales very well. Using 96 parallel readers we reach 78'000 SLOB OPS per second per socket. This is 2x the SLOB OPS compared to the 8-core SPARC-S7 CPU. 

Calculating the performance down to 1 core, we see a peak of 6500 SLOB OPS per second per core on the M12 and 5000 SLOB OPS per second per core on the S7. A M12 core outperforms the S7 core by 30%. On the S7 we see better results if only 1 single reader is executed.

Technical details

To make sure we compare oranges with oranges, the same setup was used on both servers.
A Logical Domain was created using 48GB RAM and 1 socket assigned to it.
Solaris 11.3 SRU19 / Oracle DB 12c DATABASE BUNDLE PATCH: 12.1.0.2.170418 (25397136)

We used a SPARC S7-2 (4.267 Ghz) and a SPARC M12-2S (4.25 Ghz).