AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison

Final Words - The Future of the Athlon MP?

As we've mentioned before, there's not much to get you excited when talking about the Athlon MP 2100+; it's a 66MHz clock speed increase that we've had on the desktop side for three months now. The performance boost that you get in dual processor environments over the "old" 2000+ is around 4% in some of the best case scenarios, which were illustrated by our database server tests. It's not the Athlon MP 2100+ that we should be focusing on however, it is AMD's strategy going into 2003 that requires our attention.

You've probably heard by now that AMD's Barton core will be released according to AMD's current roadmap. The Barton core will not employ Silicon on Insulator technology; it will simply use the current 0.13-micron process that was introduced with Thoroughbred. The only modification going into Barton will be the use of a 512KB L2 cache which is desperately needed by the current Athlon. Because of the exclusive L2 cache architecture employed by the K7 core and the very large L1 cache, Barton will have more data cache available than the Xeon, despite the fact that both processors will have a 512KB L2 cache.

By the end of this year Barton will be introduced as an Athlon XP processor and in the following months you will see the core transition to the MP line as well. The Barton MP core will be the entry-level workstation and server CPU of choice as it will be much cheaper to produce than the Opterons that will be available.

This brings us to discussion about the Opteron; you've undoubtedly heard talk about ClawHammer (the desktop Athlon based on the Hammer architecture) being delayed until Q1-2003. AMD's official stance (as of today) on this is that the ClawHammer release schedule will be occurring in accordance with their publicly available roadmap. If you take a look at that roadmap you'll see that ClawHammer is listed as being introduced anywhere between the second half of this year and the beginning of next year. We wouldn't rule out a late 2002 release for Hammer but the chances of a early 2003 release are seemingly much more likely now.

According to AMD there are a number of factors that will govern the release time period of the processor; among those mentioned were - the condition of the CPU and yields, chipset and motherboard readiness, OS support and the availability of compelling 64-bit applications to showcase the technology. A combination of all of those factors will determine when ClawHammer hits and also when Opteron is released on the server side.

Until then, the Athlon MP is clearly still quite competitive in the server market but Intel will be able to claim an even more significant performance lead with the introduction of a 533MHz FSB Xeon part. The large-cache Xeon MP processors are also running without competition from AMD at this point and they will continue to do so until sometime in the first half of next year when we expect to see Opterons with 1MB L2 caches. In fact, until 2003 we won't see any serious action from AMD in the server market with the exception of Thoroughbred MP. It seems to be taking all of the kings men to lift that Hammer...