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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?
because EVERYONE knows that Intel always wins.
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.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Test Results can be found here:= 6
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1982&p
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
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
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).
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.
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.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
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 .
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Full text
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!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
you know, you're supposed to outfit those AMD processors with fans, heatsinks, and some of that thermal paste....
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.
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.
And, as we all know, the plural of anecdote is indeed "data".
Never confuse volume with power.
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.
It's interesting to notice that in these tests, the Opterons were clocked quite a bit slower and had a lot less cache than the Intel CPUs, yet performed comparably in 2-way and better in 4-way than the Intel chips.
The Opteron clocked at 2.2ghz with 1MB of cache was very close in 2-way performance with the Xeon 3.0 and 3.2 ghz each with 4 and 2 mb of cache respectively. The 1.8ghz Xeon compared well with the Xeon 2.8ghz with 2MB of cache. The Opterons were typically within 3% or so of their Intel counterparts in 2-way benchmarks and closer to 10% ahead in 4-way.
If nothing else, this says a lot about the efficiency of the Opteron's design. Less silicon, and more importantly for AMD, less expensive silicon, manages to achieve very close results.
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."
"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.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
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.
"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)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications."
...
What a bunch of crap! That's almost as big a lie as Intel makes of AMD cpu's. I didn't even bother reading the rest when you are obviously delusional.
BTW A64 chips can be had for the same prices as their A32 counterparts in the same speed rating, Motherbaords are almost equally expensive whether A32 or A64, & outperform them by up to 30%.
Ok well now I have read the rest of your comments & I have to reply to those as well:
"they're going to go to Intel because it has more upgrade possibilities"
What possibilities? They force upgrades way more often than AMD, & are known for being the best money sink for performance users.
"is cheaper than the Athlon 64 for the same level of computing power"
Uh not really, A64 costs the same or less than Intel for comparable performance as long as you don't follow the rule of 'Mhz/Ghz equals performance'. Take a look at pricewatch or Newegg and see for yourself...
"currently performs better"
Hogwash.
"So this is more of a plea for AMD to extend the Athlon "32" line a bit further. Please AMD, don't prematurely kill off 32-bit Athlon chip development!"
Uh they are building them at least through the end of this year, & probably next to some degree. The thing is their is no real future for A32, performance has been decreasing performance-wise in comparison & wasn't keeping up. AMD realized their best bet was to focus on A64 with it's integrated memory controller & higher IPC than A32 has. A64 is a real contender where as A32 wasn't keeping up & they knew it.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I think time will show (barring any major gaffes) that AMD made the right move. First and foremost, the Athlon XP appeared to be reaching the end of its run. Cranking up the speed of the processor didn't really seem to yield comparable performance gains. In the early days the performance ratings on the XP line were a little iffy, but they were close enough that most people didn't really care. With the XP 3000, and 3200 though those ratings were dubious at best. The speed ratings ratings for the Athlon 64, however, are pretty accurate, even understated in some areas.
I recently upgraded my principle system and at the time, I was determined that the P4 2.8HT CPU was going to be the chip the machine was built around. It clearly trounced the Athlon XP 2800 in all tests for about $100 more. I was about to order when the AMD Atlhon 64 3000+ was released. It outperformed the Intel chip in most areas, was 64 bit, backwards compatible, and only $20 more. In my opinion, and Anandtech and Tom's Hardware agree, the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck CPU out there.
Pricewatch's Lowest Prices are...
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ - $205
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ - $251
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ - $401
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 (800) - $209
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 (800) - $273
Intel Pentium 4 3.4 (800) - $420
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - $158
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ - $194
Looking at these benchmarks here and on the following page here. You can see, with the exception of pure media encoding, the Athlon 64's perform better. The margin is slim in some areas, and quite large in others. All this and the chips are a little cheaper.
In my opinion, the XP line was dead. It had gone as far as it was going to go. I think AMD knew that the 3000 and 3200 were more like the 2850 and 2900 and they weren't going to get any more mileage out of the design. I definitely think AMD made the right call putting all their eggs in the Opteron/Athlon 64 basket.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."