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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!
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)
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
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.