On Benchmarketing: The role of unicode

When you look at the recent SAP SD certifications about the HP and the Sun systems based on Intels new hexacore proc, a cursory observer may have the impression, that either Solaris10+MaxDB is much slower than Windows+SQLServer or that Sun has somehow has fscked up the System. But as usual the explanation is in the details: The HP/Microsoft result is a non-unicode result, the Sun result is a unicode result. Why is this important? There is a good presentation made by SAP about the expected performance impact: between 15% more CPU load on new procs and 30% more CPU load on older procs and 50% more memory by using Unicode. So it´s important to know for reading benchmarketing: You can´t compare non-unicode and unicode benchmark results for SAP.