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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."
Hmmm, you should read the article before commenting.
The last two articles on Xeons used their forum database as the workload for the benchmark. In the current article he even managed to use an unnamed enterprise order management system.
Then, if you have the games and the 64 bits systems at hand, why not do a quick benchmark?
Their review of windows64 highlighted some obvious problems, probably with drivers/PCI, that may be relevant for professional use (think of CAD).
Believe it or not, Intel's compiler generates very good code for the Opteron. Far better than GCC or generic IA32 compilers.
So in any evaluation, the compiler and binaries that are used is an important question.
There was no mention of this in the article.
The jist of the whole thing is that Intel's achitecture has a huge bottleneck in its FSB. All the processors share the same FSB and quickly max it out if there are more then 2 processors. So anyone building or buying systems with more then 2 processors will get much better performance out of an AMD opteron system then an Intel.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I attend a university that is currently building a beowulf cluster, and when it came down to making a decision, the deciding factor was price/performance ratio. While it may make sense for enterprises to go with the Xeon, the Opteron is a clear winner, in my mind, when money is an object. Of course, if you have the money to burn, the Xeon may seem to be the more obvious choice.
Alright I have had about 3 AMD processors die on me. I have owned about 4 Intel processors all the way back from original Pentium. Not one has ever had a problem.
Now... given this kind of statistics, as sad as it may sound I'd say I am willing to pay anything for an Intel just to avoid the headaches.
That is an interesting use of the word statistics. In order to determine if your next processor is likely to break, you should look at thousands or hundereds of thousands of Intel procs and AMD procs. Your 7 processor study is inherently flawed.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
Firstly, Anandtech uses flash for its images so that people w/o the plugin can't see the data. This forces you to install it, so that you can see their OTHER Flash pieces... ads.
Secondly, you are not going to get MS to recompile an MS-SQL for Opteron. You're not going to get IBM to support a Linux installation, after you've rolled your own ueber-NUMA-patch-level-42 kernel.
The test was clear - out of the box, plug in servers, load OS, load app, run benchmark.
And the outcome was clear, the Opteron architecture is vastly superior, both performance and price-wise.
The MHz myth is over, at least in Slashdot and Anandtech circles.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I disagree. I'm running a Windows XP workstation with dual 2.4 GHz Xeons, and I'm not at all disappointed... neither are the 50 or 60 other developers surrounding me which are running on the same boxes.
What exactly would be our grounds for dissapointment?
That your company spent $3750x2x55= $412500 on processors alone (assuming you have the 1mb MP model Xeons), when you could have the same performance for a quarter of that price.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
need to buy new motherboards
This makes me want to throw up. The last motherboard purchase I made, it was a chore finding one with the _least_ amount of features. Need an AMR riser slot? Fuck no, I'd rather have the PCI slot back. Need integrated sound? No, integrated sound makes my already bad speakers sound worse. It must've been tough figuring out how to make a decade's worth of improvements in technology amount to nothing. I have an ISA soundblaster from 10 years ago that sounds better than the onboard sound on my last motherboard. Need integrated video? I won't begrudge you this. Some people build clusters with their motherboards, and a video card is needed to boot, but if I have a choice I won't buy a mobo with integrated video.
In short, I want a motherboard with slots for RAM, an AGP slot, a socket/slot/hole for a CPU, PS/2 hookups, serial and USB connectors, and the rest of the board filled up with PCI (or PCI express) slots. That's the ticket.
You will find that most high-end Xeon systems are also NUMA systems. IBM, Unisys, HP all construct their really big xeon boxes as NUMA-clusters of 4-processor SMPs. They create a distributed memory machine at the chip-set level. This is actually what the opteron does, except that the chip-set (well, the memory controller part of it) is built into the processor.
I think the above poster had the correct idea about NUMA, but worded it in a misleading way. A NUMA design (either of opterons, or of Xeon-quads) will have to do some memory access through the memory controllers on other nodes. This increases the latency of memory access, and can clog up the inter-processor links if lots of memory loads/stores go to remote memory. Thus NUMA-aware operating systems and system libraries are necessary to maximize the amount of memory access that is local, and minimize the usage of the inter-processor links.
While the opteron design is elegant, and fast, it is not the only smart way to do things. It offers great aggregate memory bandwidth, but can slow things down in the worst case. Most large NUMA systems are created by linking 4-way SMP nodes. (Examples: Sunfire, HP alphaservers, Cray X1, NEC SX-6, Unisys 7000, IBM xseries 4xx xeon, IBM xseries 4xx itanium,...) Apart from opteron systems, the only systems I can think of that do NUMA per processor are the cray T3E, SGI origin, and intel paragon, all of which are Massively parallel supercomuters.
It is safe to say, however, that a shared bus system does not scale well beyond a few processors. This is best demonstrated by the 36 processor SGI-challengeXL, which was significantly bottle-necked at the memory bus.
food for thought.
How about cost? The Xeons cost twice as much as the Opterons, and the Opterons give equivalent or better performance! Although you are correct that the performance difference may not be staggering (and between top of the line chips, who would expect it to be?), the price/performance ratio certainly is.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
The purpose of the test is not to test the memory, but to test the processors. Thus, they used the same memory in testing each processor configuration.
= 9. All on dual processor configurations. There is definitely no Intel bias in that test.
One of the purposes of the test was to show how the memory bandwidth bottleneck of the Xeons limits their effectiveness in 4-way configurations, which the Opterons do not have that problem. Doing this comparison with different memories would make things more complicated.
Additionally, you'll notice that Anand's final words recommend the Opteron for being at least equivalent and much cheaper than Xeon. This was also the selection process for their new forum servers, so you can bet that they aren't getting any kickback from Intel, or those would be Xeons.
If you still have doubts about the validity of Anandtech's testing, check out the benchmarks from their AMD vs. Intel web server test in December: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1935&p
Really, I think some people ought to think before they flame like this. The benchmarks are showing the Opterons to be equivalent or faster in 2-way configurations and definitely faster in 4-way configurations, so what is there to complain about? The fact that Anandtech has consistently recommended AMD's processors just makes it doubly silly.
4 Xeons (@Intel's announced pricing): $14768 ($3692 ea)
Did the quad Xeon system outperform the quad Opteron by a factor of 2.5:1? No. In fact, in some cases, the quad Opteron outperformed the quad Xeon. The Xeon had advantages of hyperthreading, 4x as much cache, and a clock speed 800mhz higher than the Opteron, ans still got beat.
Clock speed may sell in the consumer market ("Me want bigger!"), but in the server market, Opterons getting better performance for half the price are going to win more and more converts.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The Itanium2s and up are pretty decent so long as you're working with code designed for 64-bit/EPIC. Where you run into problems is with 32-bit code, or pretty much any code not designed/optimized for EPIC. There's nothing wrong with Itanium in-and-of itself; it's just not cut out for compatibility the way x86 is. Had Intel stuck with the original plan for IA-64 (which was to replace x86 from top to bottom), this would have been fine. You simply would have lost the ability to use old applications, but new ones would run reasonably fast. 10 years later, Itanium has its niche, does quite well within that niche, and sucks for everything else. :)
"I wish we could get by with cheap Xeons, but they just don't cut the mustard for our applications."
This is exactly why Opteron DOES compete with Itanium - if only indirectly. Opteron will never hit the big-tin niche, simply because it was never designed, nor intended to do so. What Opteron does is bring 64-bitness, and all the benefits therein to the mid-range crowd. This forces Intel to choose between giving up on Itanium as anything other than a big-tin chip, or losing half its mid-range customers to AMD. Losing such a lucrative market would be far worse for Intel in the long run than losing the 10 years of R&D sunk into Itanium, so they've chosen to bring the Xeon line to the 64-bit world. With the new Potomac core (Q1/H1 '05), the XeonMP will be the CPU of choice for Intelphile mid-range customers in need of Itanium's benefits, but conscious of cost. The result will be that Itanium's legs will finally be completely taken out from under it, and it will be resigned to little more than a handfull of extremely high-end big-tin servers each year.
Does this mean Intel should continue to develop Itanium, even if it becomes clear it can no longer sustain its own R&D? I don't know - I think that's a question for Intel's board to answer. What I do know is that AMD had it right in '98/'99 when they decided to help transition people to 64-bit CPUs without losing x86's incredible compatibility. The bottom line is that someone like you would have gladly gone with either Opterons or Xeons had the choice been given to you. Unfortunately for Intel's margins, you and those in your position now have that choice.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
They WILL standardize on a socket, it's just that the socket will be Socket 939 and not the current one.
It's pretty much the same story with SlotA/SocketA. They had an initial design that was quickly replaced. The second socket then stuck it out for the duration.
Intel did pretty much the same thing with their P4, initially releasing it on socket 423 and then quickly moving to socket 478 which has lasted for several years now (though it too will soon be replaced).
Markets change, technology changes, and sometimes sockets need to change with them. Remeber that the specification for Socket 754 and Socket 940 for current Athlon64 chips was set in stone about 3 years ago (before the first beta chips tapped out), and a lot has changed since then. AMD has gone to great lengths to minimize socket changes, but there's only so much that they can do.