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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."
Can somebody tell me if the IA-32e processors will be in the socket 478 format to work with existing boards, or will they require a whole new socket and chipset (rather than a bios update) If they really are just "extensions" then I don't see why anything special would need to be on the motherboard correct? The cpu should switch into 64bit mode whenever the OS tells it to right?
Xeon's are almost always for servers, wheras Opeteron's can be for anything. Try running a windows xp workstation on a dual Xeon system and you'll be very disappointed.
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It's probably due to the lack of knowledge/tools to benchtest anything else. I'd like to see SQL benchtests, IIS/Apache test/etc but just like a lot of other people, I don't know exactly how to do that. Though if I ran a site which made it my business to test hardware I'd definately find out and learn how to do it.
I'd like to see more "Consumer Reports" type tests to. Test hardware configuration X as a high-volume SQL server, and show me how it's held up after a month, 3 months, 6 months, and a year. Yes, maybe I'd upgrade before then, but not everyone would, and I'd like to see common failures and problems down the line - not a 1-2 day test.
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One thing I did not understand is how come the 3MB cache is helping with big database query ? I thought that will thrash the cache and there will be not much performance gain if you are working with bigger code/data set. Also, for the four CPU opteron, do they have hyper transport going from every cpu to every cpu ? Is it like a mesh or like a ring where every cpu has only two connections to it's next ones.
Another thing I did not get is how linux is handling ( not handling ) the local memory to the CPU. This thing looks like a mini-numa type system. Does linux actually try to keep the data in the RAM and process it with the cpu it is connected to ? how does this really work ?
May be you guys can help clear my ideas .
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Folks were avoiding the Itanium because it was a disaster; slow and expensive. We've been looking at 64 bit computing for a while, because of the seamless > 4GB RAM capabilities. Intel's PAE extensions are OK, but they really didn't solve any of the problems we were having.
The net result was we went to 64 bit PPC architecture 3 years ago on those critical systems, And everything has been fine. AIX works great, and IBM's embrace of GNU/Linux means an easy learning curve for us Linux users.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
But these days days with all the virtualization getting hot(vmware etc), a server architecture with a single memory bus/controller is getting old.
I'd like to see some test on servers like the IBM x445 with NUMA.
The tests in this article, involved running the same exact binaries (out-of-the-box Microsoft 386 stuff) on both types of CPUs, rather than the code being compiled to run natively. The Opterons were fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.
In other words, this benchmark is mainly only of interest to Microsofties. If that's what you run, then fine, the article may be useful to you and you may get something out of reading it.
If you are trying to maximize speed, though, then the software contraints that this test took place under, are totally contrary to what you'd actually be doing (running code that is appropriate for the hardware).
BTW, another weird thing I noticed about this article: these guys use flash for static images of bar graphs. WTF? Anandtech, your w3b d3$1gn3rz R S0 31337!!!1
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In addition, Anand used sub-optimal memory in the Opteron, and non-NUMA config. Looks like he had some Intel "assistance" in designing the "benchmarks" as well... the database read/write ratio is not at all realistic, favors the Xeon.
I have not heard that the Itaniums were slow since Intel came out with the Itanium2. Yes, the Itanium1's were dog slow. I've got 65 Itanium2 processors downstairs, and I'm happy with them. For our purposes (crunching numbers on very large datasets) the Itanium2 was the platform of choice because of its 64bit addressing, high memory bandwidth and good processor speed.
I wish we could get by with cheap Xeons, but they just don't cut the mustard for our applications.
Opteron systems seemed to fare the best, although dual Xeon configurations almost always beat dual Opterons.
Perhaps the benchmarks show the 2P Xeon's doing OK against 2P Opteron's, but for the price of two Xeon MP chips you can buy five Opteron 848's. Rounding that down, I wonder how well the 2P Xeon does against the 4P Opteron? Oops, Anand already though of that. He says "it would not be pretty." Indeed.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yes, the tests weren't exactly apples-to-apples - the outcomes are actually much better for AMD than the graphs would initially appear.
The graphs mean that Opterons with a "measly" 1 meg of cache are beating out Xeons that have (a) four times the cache, (b) 50% higher clock speed, and (c) a price tag that's three times higher.
Hats off to AMD. In times past (K2/K3), price was the only thing they had better than Intel. Now they've got both price and performance.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"People bash the x86 architecture and at the same time, bash anything that isn't x86."
Well, I think that people look at the x86 architecture, and they can see the many, many horrible hacks that have been used to sustain it. That much is pretty obvious if you spend even 10 minutes looking over things. You sit there scratching your head and going, "What the hell? Why'd they do that?", and then realize it's because something, somewhere, was broken until they did it. The reason people don't like to start looking into replacement architectures is exactly as you expressed; the must-have software. You can try running that software under emulation, but the best architecture in the world is always going to take a performance nosedive when running code under emulation. I can look at what IBM has been doing, or even at what Intel was doing with EPIC back in the day, and I can say, "wow, that's pretty cool". But what I can't do is put down the x86, toss all the old software, and hope that all the new software, written for a completely new architecture, is going to work in some sort of reliable fashion. What you really get with x86 is 20 years of experience, and thus, a measure of predictability. In essence, you're paying for predictable problems (much better than unpredictable ones) with old, poor architecture.
"The AMD solution doesn't do away with x86"
AMD64 actually does get rid of a lot of garbage in x86 that is no longer in use. Take a look at the presentation (link at Ace's) by the guy who designed AMD64. He was actually pretty thrilled (well, as thrilled as this guy gets) about being able to dump a lot of the cruft x86 has accumulated. Unfortunately, many things had to remain intact, for the obvious reason of compatibility. I have to warn you though, the guy from the AMD presentation is a real ball of fire. (Although, the ex-Intel guy from the other presenation was pretty interesting and funny)
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