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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
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!
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.
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....
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)
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.
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
"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."
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."