AMD's 3rd generation Opteron versus Intel's 45nm Xeon: a closer look
by Johan De Gelas on November 27, 2007 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Words of Thanks
Many people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Trevor Lawless, Intel US
Sanjay Sharma, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
Joshua Mora, AMD US
Brett Jacobs, AMD US
(www.amd.com)
Randy Chang, ASUS
(www.asus.com)
Kelly Sasso, Crucial Technology
Benchmark configuration
Here is the list of the different configurations. We flashed all servers to the latest BIOS, and unless we add any specific comments to the contrary, the BIOS are set to default settings.
Xeon Server
1: Intel "Stoakley platform" server
Supermicro X7DWE+/X7DWN+ Bios rev 1.0
2x Xeon E5472 at 3GHz
8GB (4x2GB) Crucial Registered FB-DIMM DDR2-667 CL5 ECC
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Xeon
Server 2: Intel "Bensley platform" server
2x Xeon E5365 at 3GHz or 2x Xeon E5345 at 2.33GHz
Intel Server Board S5000PSL - Intel 5000P Chipset
8GB (4x2GB) Crucial Registered FB-DIMM DDR2-667 CL5 ECC
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
Opteron 2350 Server: ASUS KFSN4-DRE
Dual Opteron 2350 2GHz
Asus KFSN4DRE BIOS version 1001.02 (8/28/2007) - NVIDIA nForce Pro 2200 chipset
8GB (4x2GB) Crucial Registered DDR2-667 CL5 ECC
NIC: Broadcom BCM5721
Opteron Socket F 1207 Server: Tyan Transport
TA26 - 2932
Dual Opteron 2222 3GHz/2224SE 3.2GHz
Tyan Thunder n3600m (S2932) - NVIDIA nForce Pro 3600 chipset
8GB (4x2GB) Crucial Registered DDR2-667 CL5 ECC
NIC: nForce Pro 3600 integrated MAC with Marvell 88E1121 Gigabit Ethernet PHY
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705
OS Software
64-bit SUSE Linux SLES 10 SP1 (Linux 2.6.16.46-smp x86_64)
32-bit Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
Regs - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I would not expect any from vendors and wholesalers until early next year.Matter of fact I wouldn't want one until then anyhow. I would at least wait until B3 stepping.
TA152H - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Johan,From my understanding, x87 is now obsolete and not even supported in x86-64. Can you verify this? I know I had read it, from your article you state that Intel improved it, so I'm not as sure. I had assumed one of AMD's handicaps was the disproportionate, and nearly useless, x87 processing power their processors carried, but now I am not as sure. Is x87 supported in x86-64, and if not, why would Intel increase their x87 capabilities when it's clearly a deprecated technology?
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
The x87 instructions can be used in legacy mode and long mode. But it is true that Scalar SSE instructions are preferred by AMD and Intel.x87 performance as many 32 bit programs are still important (look at 3DSMAx 32 bit).
If Intel's newest Core architecture would not have improved the x87 FP it would probably have looked silly as so many 32 bit programs still use it intensively. Secondly, as you can see, things like the Radix-16 circuitry are used by both the SIMD as the x87 units.
Gholam - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Do you have any plans to benchmark Opteron vs Xeon in an ESX Server environment?DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
This is exactly what I was thinking of too. I want to change my mode of working to run several separate VM's, one for programming, one for Office etc and really want to know how Phenom compares to Q6600 for those uses. Well, this article looks at the server versions of those chips but for VMware the performance might be more comparable than, say, SuperPi 1M benchmarks!DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I forgot to add, since Phenom would presumably also have the nested table support as Barcelona, how much performance improvement would this yield? I'd love to knowsht - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I was about to ask the same question after reading the concludingYou may feel for example that using four instances in our SPECjbb test favors AMD too much, but there is no denying that using more virtual machines on fewer physical servers is what is happening in the real world.
Since the CPUs have features that should accelerate virtualization, it would really be interesting to see how they compete there. My only addition to your request would be to add KVM as host as well (and XEN and what not as well if you care, though I really think only KVM is of interest).
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.AssBall - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Thanks, Johan.This has been one of the clearer and better proofread articles I have read here lately. It was interesting, unbiased, and insightful. I am excited to see what you get into for your next project.