STAC Report: RMDS 6 on a 45nm Intel Xeon “Harpertown” Processor

New processor boosts server's total market data throughput per watt by 19%. Wednesday, 27 February 2008 - Reducing power consumption in the data center is a high priority for securities firms today. Intel recently released quad-core Xeon processors (code named "Harpertown") based on a 45nm manufacturing process, which the company claims significantly reduce power consumption compared to its previous generation of quad-core processors ("Clovertown"). STAC performed a study comparing the power consumption of a server using Harpertown processors to the same server using Clovertown processors. We ran a market data load of 2 million updates per second across a stacked RMDS configuration that utilized as much of the 8 cores in this system as possible. We found that the Harpertown processor decreased the server's overall power consumption by 16% (333 watts vs 395 watts) and increased the server's market data efficiency (updates per second per watt) by 19% (6,010 ups/W vs 5,060 ups/W). Report download here available to registered users at no cost.