Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors Deliver Performance Boosts for IT and Developers

ID 672142
Updated 11/2/2017
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Ongoing improvements to Aerospike* software and Intel® architecture deliver substantial performance gains with the latest generation of the database and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.

This year, Intel launched the highly anticipated Intel® Xeon® platform, our highest-performance, most versatile data center platform ever. Intel is constantly increasing the performance of its platforms and this relentless improvement benefits everyone from developers to end-users. Some features of the new scalable platform include more processor cores, increased memory bandwidth, Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512), and an array of other advancements. Each new generation of Intel platforms deliver new performance levels and capabilities out of the box, but this debut is the biggest in a decade – and offers developers and IT an opportunity to achieve even further performance gains with software optimizations.

Aerospike* Sees Four Times the Performance Increase

One great example is Aerospike, a hybrid memory architecture database. Aerospike has enhanced their software with capabilities like auto-tuning, in order to take advantage of new Intel microarchitectures. The Intel Xeon platform is based on the new Intel® Mesh Architecture design, which provides significant per-core advances and a lower-latency L1/L2 cache hierarchy that directly benefits customers’ analytics efforts with Aerospike’s data-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads. Increased hardware parallelism of up to 28 cores per system socket complements the enhanced core affinity that is built into the latest version of Aerospike Database*, leading to better performance, more efficient workloads, and most importantly faster actionable insights! The Intel Xeon platform also has a redesigned memory subsystem and support for up to 24 DIMMs of DDR4-2667 RAM, allowing database servers the ability to scale up system memory to aid in the handling of very large data sets.

Thanks to these features and Aerospike’s optimizations, Aerospike saw up to a 4X1 increase in throughput by replacing systems that were a few years old with ones featuring Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 processors and Aerospike 3.12.1 software. To hear more about what Aerospike was able to achieve and how this enables them to deliver a better customer experience, check out their blog “Aerospike Redefines “Fast” Thanks to Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors.” We also published a solution brief, which goes into more detail on how these impressive achievements were possible.

New Platform Equals Business Advantages for IT

The gains that Aerospike saw with Intel Xeon Scalable processors translate into real business benefits like agility and higher performance. Intel Xeon Scalable processors offer an outstanding hardware foundation for organizations that want to provide customers with a great experience by maintaining low latency, scaling almost without limit, protecting their business with mission-critical reliability and uptime, and doing all of this while containing costs with outstanding performance per server. Intel has delivered a platform that provides businesses with all the necessary tools to modernize their data centers and increase their performance, agility, and security. This new platform can help IT managers run and grow their business, respond to competitive threats, and provide better response time to end-users. There simply has never been a better time to refresh your infrastructure to take full advantage of these solution innovations.

What Developers Can Do to Optimize

Aerospike saw significant performance benefits thanks to their ongoing optimizations for Intel-based platforms. Most applications will see compelling performance gains “out of the box,” but for developers that want the guide map to squeeze out every ounce of performance possible, Intel has created a wide array of developer tools to help optimize software for our latest platforms. Visit the Intel® Developer Zone at https://software.intel.com/en-us for all of the tools you need to develop on Intel hardware and software. And for details on how to optimize for the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, visit https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/intel-xeon-processor-scalable-family-technical-overview.html.

1: For more information on the performance and system configuration please see #7 at www.intel.com/xeonconfigs.

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations, and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products.