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Xeon vs. Opteron Performance Benchmarks
QuickSand writes "Anand got his hands on some of Intel and AMD's enterprise processors including 4MB L3 Xeons, and put them to the test. Results were a little varied as 4-way Opteron systems seemed to fare the best, although dual Xeon configurations almost always beat dual Opterons. The exact benchmarks are here."
I remember AMD's K6-3 would blow away the K6-2 at the same clock speed with the major difference being the cache.
Whomever is citing Anandtech as claiming the dual Xeons almost always beat the dual-Opterons needs to read the article again. Both Architectures in a dual configuration tended to perfom about the same with Opteron and Xeon each winning some of the time. The Opteron scales better above dual configurations. However the Opteron is HALF the price of a Xeon! Cost/performance (or else we would all have 12th generation DECAlphas or Power5s by now) is easily handed to Opteron. Nice spin!
Avrice
At two processors Xeon is still ok because the bandwidth of the memory coherency still isn't in serious contention. However, as the systems scale larger support for NUMA is critical to reducing memory latency because it means that memory does not have to flow in from the controllers on other processors.
That is why Opteron is required for good performance with eight to sixteen processors, and you can even see the improvement on the four way tests that Anand ran.
Some info here. SSE3 is the big thing.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Why can't AMD make a Dual AMD64?
They DO. It's called an Opterion!
Guess you are refering to the Athlon64 which is a one way processor (just like the Pentium 4).
BTW the Opterion is made in 3 flavors, the 100 series is a SINGLE way cpu with NO smp support. It's very nearly the same as the Athlon64-FX. The Opterion 200 series is a 2 way (2 cpus), and the Opterion 800 series supports up to 8 cpus. AMD dropped plans for a 400 series, but you can use the 800 series chips to build servers with 1-8 cpu's.
Anand seems to conclude something a bit different then the submitter:
The comparison we've made here is a very important one; it identifies Intel's strengths and their weaknesses with Xeon, and it crowns Opteron a clear multiprocessor winner. An area that we didn't touch on is cost, which is where AMD truly shines. The Opteron 848 processors we tested are around 1/2 the price of Intel's 2MB L3 Xeon MPs and we have not seen retail data on how expensive the 4MB parts will be.
In a 4-way configuration AMD's Opteron cannot be beat, and thus it is our choice for the basis for our new Forums database server.
"although dual Xeon configurations almost always beat dual Opterons."
/. ?
Perhaps the submitter's screen reader doesn't work well with flash, but in the 2-way benchmarks, Opteron was on top twice, and Xeon was on top 3 times. All the 2-way benchmarks were fairly close (within 5%), and the Xeons never beat the Opterons by a margin greater than 1.7%. I don't quite know where 40% wins translate into "almost always" loses. In other words, the story submitter is a moron, or simply didn't look at the article.
"Results were a little varied as 4-way Opteron systems seemed to fare the best,"
Seemed? Let's see, out of five 4-way benchmarks, Opteron won... all of them - performing about 10% better than Xeons each time.
Since when did we start letting Tom Pabst submit articles to
Note to editors: When the submission is non-sequitur, either reject it or edit it.
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