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Opteron Benchmarked Against Xeon
jbmnuke writes "Tom's Hardware has posted a review of AMD's Opteron v. Intels Xeon." Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right? Update: 04/22 12:35 GMT by H : And there's the official benchmarks as well, with more coming - like Linux Magazine and Newsforge
Suddenly, I feel this is old news... It came out five hours ago for gossake!
_ ____Very good____Good
Nonetheless here is the condensed version:
_____________Server_______Workstation
Opteron_
Xeon_________Good_________Very Good
Check the Spec benchmarks here.
SpecFP_rate, 2CPUs:
Itanium2 1GHz: 30.7
Opteron 1.8GHz: 26.7
SpecFP_rate, 4CPUs:
Itanium2 1GHz: 49.3
Opteron 1.8GHz: 49.2
Here we see the beauty of AMDs integrated memory contoller. Despite that 1GHz Itanium2 is a $4000 chip and has 3MB of cache, doubling the number of CPUs increase performance only by 60% because Itanium2 uses shared bus.
Opteron gets impressive 84% improvement because
memory bandwidth increases as more CPUs are added.
In SpecInt Opteron is much more faster than more expensive Itanium2.
Tom seems to be blocking referrals from slashdot, so copy and paste this to make it view the article: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/index.htm l
when are we going to see something featuring currently manufactured product?
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
However, there's little doubt that they are meant to be compared to pentiums, and you raise an interesting point. Even stranger would be - what happened if intel adopted the same scheme? Then they'd both basically be making up numbers!
No, I don't want a free iPod
The German version of the review seems to be quite a lot faster now than the English one: http://www.de.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/index. html
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
So what? MHz isn't everything. AMD is trying to make this abundantly clear with their performance ratings and talk like this is simply counterproductive.
If you want a "fair" benchmark then it should be a 2.8GHz Xeon vs the Opteron x44, both with the same amount of memory. A better benchmark, however, may be Itanium2 vs Opteron, but you can't run standard benchmarks on the I2 -- it's simply not designed for it. Oracle transaction ratings (albeit largely disk I/O dependant) and similar server benchmarks would be useful though.
Excluding the memory mismatch, however, it's a good idea to compare the Xeon 3.06 and the Opteron x44 -- they're the top end chips available and so the most likely for corporate shops to be choosing from. An alternate comparison would be similarly priced chips -- at current prices you'd be looking at the Xeon 2.8GHz.
It gets worse, Dual channel was available for the Opteron, but not enabled. Also, and this one is not Tom's fault, the Opteron supports DDR400, but Tom used DDR333. The problem is the super limited supplies of DDR400 w/ECC,reg.
This is where the opteron with an 800mhz fsb with DDR333 ends up with less memory bandwidth than a Xeon with DDR266. The 533mhz bus Xeon used Dual Channel, giving it an effective 533 bus while the 800mhz bus Opteron was chokeing on 333mhz memory.
That is why the Opteron was falling down in the workstation benchmarks, because they tended to be bandwidth hogs.
Looking again, the opteron used 4 x 256 sticks of ram... 1 Gb not two.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
So Centrino running at 1.6 Ghz but outperforming the 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 is invalid?
How about Itanium at 1.2 Ghz outperforming the Pentium 4 at 3.06?
Or how about the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 beating the 3.06 Pentium 4 in every benchmark?
Yeah, you are right, Centrino, Itanium and the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 are all P.O.S. They are all officially dead.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Keep in mind this opteron only uses 40 Watts.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Dual channel was available but not enabled.
The opteron uses an 800mhz memory bus.
But was chokeing on single channel DDR333
The Xeon was running Dual channel DDR266 or 533mhz effective.
Vast oversight (Intentional?) on Tom's part.
The Xbit labs clawhammer article shows the memory controller pushes at 97% of DDR400 theoretical maximum.
Now you know why all the "workstation apps" ran so poorly. They were all bandwidth intensive and Tom's ran the Opteron crippled.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Here
The review is very good and contains lot of real-world Linux benchmarks.
Ace's hardware as an in-depth review as well, and it isn't slashdotted.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000251
Ace's hardware has an article up. Their benchmarks are showing Opteron beating Xeon by 20% in 3DSmax while Tom's has Xeon beating opteron by 25% in the same test.
Right-O, toss out tom with the rest of the paid for rabble and move on to less biased sites.
Another "Editorial Content Sponsorship" from tom.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
You are wrong. Opteron can use DDR333 or DDR400. Same memories P4/Xeon use (that's what AMD has said, DDR400 is just not officially supported. It does seem that Athlon64 does fully support DDR400 as well). So there's exactly zero difference there. Opteron has 2x64bit memory-bus, same as P4. Again: zero difference between the two.
You can use DDR400 just fine. Period. End of story. And besides, fastest memory you can use on P4 is 400MHz, and the difference between 333Mhz and 400Mhz isn't that big.
You are (again) confusing FSB-speed with the speed of the RAM. Yes, the FSB on Xeon if 533Mhz. No, the RAM is NOT 533Mhz. The P4 that had best bandwidth-figures in Toms tests used DDR400.
Yes. Second mem-channel was not enabled on the Opteron, whereas it was on P4. review at Aceshardware shows more realistic bandwidth-numbers.
Please, learn about this stuff before you start to "educate" others, OK?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It doesn't get my blood pumping, I can't afford such things...
Actually, you can afford it; I submitted this a couple days ago, but I guess it didn't make the cut:
Its much better at finding server-centric applications to benchmark:
Ace's Hardware Review
The Opteron will be available in a desktop version. The Xeon is not, and will not be.
That means there is a HUGEEEEEEE difference in price.
Also, every review except for Tom's shows the Opteron beating Xeons in more workstation tests --- Tom didn't enable the second memory channel or use DDR400. Both of which limited performance.
Read the review ..
;)
AMD did not implement the full 64-bit virtual address (neither does Itanium2). The Opteron has *only* 48-bit virtual address and 40-bit physical address. That means it can address upto 256TB of virtual space and 1TB physical space.
And yeah, 256TB ought be enough for everyone
The Opteron will be available in a desktop version. The Xeon is not, and will not be.
How so? The Opteron is to the Athlon64 ("the desktop version") as the current-generation Xeon is to the Pentium 4. In fact, the Pentium 4 is much closer to the Xeon than the Athlon64 is to the Opteron.
Tom didn't enable the second memory channel
The Athlon64 will not have a second memory channel regardless...
or use DDR400
Can't blame him for that. AMD does not officially support DDR400.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.