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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
It doesn't get my blood pumping, I can't afford such things (or cool them)! *Pats Duron 1000*
Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping like the flood of trolls this sort of comparison should inspire.
but it reminds me of a benchmark performed between desktop x86's and a sun machine. Given the different architectures, it really didn't make sense. However, the benchmark was supposed to show price::performance. Is this what Pabst is trying to convey? I don't take much stock in benchmarks anyway, as I would rather get my hands on it and try to break it.
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So you do not believe that Intel got where they got today becuase of competition and pressure? You sincerely believe that Intel wouldn't sit back on their lazy ass and inflate prices, if there were no copmetition?
Naivity ensues obviosuly.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
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
Didn't I see this in an Evangelion episode?
-Tolerate my intolerance
I was right, I got this link off another website (amdforums.com), when I noticed it was slowing to a crawl I immediately thought "Slashdot". What do you know! first story :p
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
"Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right?"
I find sex better, whatever flicks your switch I guess...
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.
The dual Xeon has 512 MB RAM.
The dual Opteron has 2 GB RAM.
Pretty sloppy, if you ask me.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right?
Seeing a naked girl is really going to blow your mind.
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.
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Well, these benchmarks are supposedly suggesting that Opterons excell at server-type operations, while workstation performance is lacking. However, if you check their benchmark setups, there seems to be another way of looking at this: isn't is so that Opterons simply run better on Linux rather than Windows?
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
or is that Opteron, one HUGE processor?
Pictures on computers can not possibly be to scale as we have different screen sizes and resolution, for instance, if you are looking at it on a project then it probably is you
Conclusion: you
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
Slashdotted after 20 comments, that was quicker than usual.
Considering how P4 3.06Ghz actually runs at 3Ghz and does much better at .....
/. readers seem to as well. Naive of me perhaps to think that /. readers would be more clued up, but hey.
Tell me, why is the fact it actually runs at 3Ghz important?
MHz is not a useful measure of performance.
Jesus. No wonder AMD implemented their 'marketing MHz' rating system - the average guy on the street thinks that's how you measure perfomance of CPUs, and even some
I'd love to see the MHz rating be completely scrapped from how we rate CPUs in stores. Yes, it's useful to see that an AMD 2000+ is faster than a 1800+, but it's not so great when comparing with Intel chips. The trouble is that since AMDs are better at some things, and Intels better at others, a number of figures would have to be provided to make a fair and useful comparison. Too many numbers though I'm sure might confuse people, so I guess we'll be stuck with the MHz wars for a while yet.
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
Why does P4 with 2x64bit memory-bus get so much better results than opteron with 2x64bit memory-bus? One would think that since the mem-controller is integrated on the Opteron, it would get better results. Also, since each CPU has it's own memory-bank but they can still use other CPU's memory as well, the bandwidth should go up as number of CPU's increase. But still, P4 has more bandwidth than 2x Opterons! How can that be? IS there something wrong with the chip Tom benchmarked?
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How about these?
Stick Men
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
Ace's hardware as an in-depth review as well, and it isn't slashdotted.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000251
Finally been able to read the whole article, damn 404's, I think the opteron is very reasonable as a workstation its not bleeding edge compared to the dual xeon rig, but it all comes down to the price, if amd can sell this chip slightly cheaper than the xeon then its definately gonna sell extremely well, my only worry is the yield per wafer, this is really gonna have a huge affect on the price i dont know if they can afford to price it cheaper than the xeon, im confused at where this is being marketed, is it a direct competitor to the itanium(2) or xeon?
I'm just a little dissapointed with the whole ddr2 situation, i find it interesting that some mobo maufacurers have already worked out how to disable the on-chip memory controller, will using a northbridge memory controller have even larger latencies as a side affect of that? i suppose its just gonna depend on how long it takes amd to react and change the controller.
I think the smartest thing they can do with this chip is upgrade the controller to ddr2 and move to a 9ìm production processes, but is this gonna happen anyway because of the fab venture with ibm?
Jarvik brand coolant pumps, Hellfire thermal paste, copper tubing with simulated brimstone anodized finish. And as for the cosmetic aspects of the case-modding, the thematic possibilities are endless. Start with this: Horns!!!
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Its much better at finding server-centric applications to benchmark:
Ace's Hardware Review
I wish he did do some more appropriate tests, though. By far, the one app that I spend the most time waiting for on my desktop, is gcc and I would love to have seen comparative timings for that. Time gcc building itself or the kernel or a whole Gentoo system (I both love and hate Gentoo ;-) or something, make -j 3.
It would also be interesting to see comparative timings for mencoder, though it might be hard to justify that as a benchmark when you have a multiprocessor system.
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What the fuck are you talking about ? It takes no more cycles than it did to do 32-bit pointer math, because that's part of what being a 64 bit CPU means.
Programmers can be much more productive today because they don't have to waist as much time getting simple things done and if it is at the cost of some speed and bloat, I am just fine with that. If a program takes a month to slap together using (by your definition) inefficient tools but doing it the "right way" (by your definition) would take nine months- which way is better? In the past when machines were slow and short on resources, the extra eight months might have been the right solution. Thankfully today, in most cases, the one month solution is the better option and as a programmer (and user), I am happy with that. Faster computers allows for programmers and users be more prductive.
I miss the Karma Whores.
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
Commodity 64.. did anyone except myself read this as Commodore 64???
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
That was 16.5 years ago, not 10.
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I think the point these folks are attempting to make is:
We've been doing the desktop dance for the last few years, IPCs fluctuating, but performance and power usage always rising.
Yet, a decade ago, Intel was strictly against this kind of practice. Intel chips for years were packaged in a big ceramic heat spreader, and could be run without a sink. There were no multipliers, memory ran at processor click speed, so there was little performance skew. Performance increased linearly with CPU clock speed. Even with the 486, Intel never released a chip with more than 2x multiplier, and purposefully never released a chip that required an active fan cooling the heatsink. It was only after the Pentium was released that they gave in to competition and pushed clock speeds, power disappation and multipliers.
What ever happened to the concept of the efficient computer? Sure, we've tackled the multiplier issues using multiple layers of efficient cache, paired with features like prefetch.
But what about power consumption?
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptop computers using the Centrino chip, AND THEY SPANK the P4 clock-for-clock.
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptops ion development using the extremely low power ATI Mobile DirectX 9 solution.
Both these chipsets are designed to maximize performance for power, and have the capability to shut down unused parts of the chip for maximum power efficiency.
AND NEITHER OF THEM ARE AVAILABLE FOR DESKTOP. NOR will they ever be. Nobody cares that desktop power consumption has quadrupled since the 486, and the processor's power consumption alone has increased by almost 10x.
We don't have to have windtunnel systems. We don't have to settle for VIA Epia boards with the horsepower of a 386. The sad fact is the perfect balance already exists, but you'll never see it except in an overpriced notebook.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
...with no NUMA support. Means it wasn't using the memory controllers optimally (only one channel used instead of two).
Tom's review was laughable at best.