SAPS Olympics: 10 years ago

Let’s go back around ten years, what did happen in the SAPS arena back then? In this analysis I have considered the 130 systems that were measured with the SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.70 benchmark specification. The first one was in 2003 April 4^th, a Mitsubishi Apricot with certification number 2003032, and the last one was published in Jul 4^th 2005, an Egenera pBlade 950-000084 with certification number 2005037. That is, more than two years of time span. All the numbers and calculations are based on the official SAPS (SD 2-Tier) results posted at http://global.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx.

 

Remember that you have to be careful when comparing two SAPS values if they correspond to two different benchmark specs. You have to take into account software release effects and other benchmark specs changes. This is like the need to take into account the inflation rates when comparing the value of year 2008 dollars to year 2014 dollars. Current SAPS are heavier than past ones.

SAP Technology Partners

The SAP Technology Partners (a SAP concept) that were actively benchmarking SAPS. Fujitsu sometimes appears alone and sometimes with Siemens, but I’ve grouped both in the count.

 

By CPU family

The Intel Xeon was the dominating family, and this is a constant in the history of SAPS Olympics. AMD Opteron had strong presence. Intel Itanium was alive, and they were also IBM POWER5, UltraSPARC IV, SPARC64 V, and PA-RISC times.

By Operating System

Operative systems seen: Windows Server 2000 and 2003, IBM AIX 5, Solaris 9, Linux SLES 8, and HP-UX 11.

 

By Relational Database Management System

Relational Database Management Systems seen:  Microsoft SQL Server 2000, IBM DB2 UDB 8 and 9.5, Oracle 9i and SAP DB. All of them transitioning from 32-bit to 64-bit flavors.

Absolute Number of SAPS (SAPS per system)

Gold -> Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER 2500 with 128 SPARC64 V @2080 MHz processors: 105820 SAPS.

Silver-> IBM eServer p5 Model 595 with 64 POWER5 @1900 MHz: 100700 SAPS.

Bronze -> Sun Fire Model E25k with 72 UltraSPARC IV @1200 MHz: 51070 SAPS.

The last ->  Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY Model BX300 with 1 Intel Pentium M @1800 MHz: 830 SAPS.

  

 

SAPS per core / per thread

In those days the processor and core terms were managed by marketing and, consequently, blurred and misdefined.  The problem is that sometimes processors are equal to cores, and sometimes they are not. In the SAPS official table the cores (and threads) column are zero, and only the processor column is filled. Thus, I cannot offer a significative analysis unless I take big time analyzing system by system (and that is not in my near scope.