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AMD Takes Opteron To 2.4GHz
EconolineCrush writes "AMD has added a series of Opteron x50 processors to its workstation and server line that push the K8 core up to 2.4GHz. The Tech Report has tested the latest single and dual-processor Opterons against more than 20 other processors, including exotic Pentim 4 Extreme Edition chips, affordable Athlon 64s, and everything in between. Even if you have no interest in AMD's latest workstation chips, the review is worth checking out to see how two dozen of the fastest workstation and PC processors stack up in rendering, scientific computing, speech recognition, and even gaming tests."
From the article to save everyone the 16 pages of boring charts and graphs.. Conclusions "If I were building (or, implausibly perhaps, buying) my ultimate workstation right now, I'd want a pair of Opteron 250s beating at the heart of it. The benchmarks speak volumes. For single-processor systems, the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet. In a multiprocessor configuration, the Opteron 250 scales up very well, even without the benefit of an optimal memory configuration, a NUMA-aware OS, or 64-bit extensions. By contrast, Intel's dual Xeons are a little bit disappointing. They perform relatively well in CPU-bound apps like 3D rendering programs, which are also largely well optimized for SSE2. But in memory-bound applications where dual Xeons ought to do well, like video encoding, the Xeons' slow bus and RAM hold them back. One has to wonder what Intel is hoping to accomplish by saddling its workstation-class processors with older, slower technology. Even a single Pentium 4 benefits greatly from additional bus and memory bandwidth. Surely a pair of Xeons on shared bus ought to have this same advantage. Intel's apparent willingness to forego such enhancements in favor of adding ever-larger on-chip caches to the Xeon is puzzling"
Hmmm.
I have been running my Opteron 248 at 2400Mhz. Sisoft seems to equate this to a PR rating of 3900+. I have no idea how it calculates this so please take that with a measure of salt.
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
I had an AMD64 chip with the heat spreader.
I went to take the heat sink off the other day, and the vacuum that formed between the heat spreader and heat sink caused the chip to get yanked right out of the closed ZIF socket when I tried to get the heat sink off.
Then, after reinstalling the chip, apparently the heat spreader has become disconnected from the core internally, because the CMOS reports rising temperature up to 120C, but even the heat spreader isn't warm if I turn the system off and get the heat sink off again.
So be very careful. It takes about 10 minutes to take the heat sink off the heat spreader if you used a coating of grease that covers the whole top of the chip, even if you used a thin coat. You have to wiggle the heat sink and gently pull up for quite a while before that vacuum is broken. It doesn't help that the heat sink design makes it impossible to see the chip or slide the heat sink to the side.
And be aware that it doesn't take a whole lot of force to yank the chip right from the ZIF, possibly damaging things in the process.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It will be interesting to see how Intel responds to these challenges - c't speculates that the future Pentiums will use the architecture they have in the Pentium M line (developed in Israel). If they're smart they'll introduce a dual core CPU based on the Pentium M architecture, if AMD is smart they'll modify their existing designs and beat intel to the punch again.
Speaking as a business user, I'd welcome an emphasis on ergonomics and environmental concerns over raw speed. I'd rather have silent systems that do not overload the air conditioning with enormous amounts of heat than screamers which spend 99.9 % of their time waiting for the user to press a key anyway.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Has anyone actually checked on the price? Take a gander over at http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_609,00.html?redir=CPT301 The new 150/250/850 models are $637/$851/$1514 comparatively. Compare that to the *48 models, which are still expensive.
Does AMDs increased market share herald a a new strategy from AMD? Back "in the day" we all used to love AMDs more than Intels because of the great performance/cost ratio.
I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous. I miss the old AMD...
The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.
Itanium servers are out of your league. A decent 1.5Ghz Itanium chip with 3Mb of on-die cache will set you back around $3,000. Not including memory, hard disks, etc. Just for ONE chip.
Xeon are way cheaper, but in most cases are more expensive than Opterons, do not scale very well when used in 2-way or higher configurations, and can only use 4Gb in flat mode. To access above 4Gb, you need to use PAE, which greatly hampers the performance (PAE is akin to the "high-memory" window trick they used back in the DOS days).
Opterons, on the other hand, are usually cheaper than Xeons, much cheaper than Itanium, almost always have better performance that Xeons, scale much better (in fact, a 2-way server performs better than a 1-way times 2!) and are only beat by Itanium in floating point performance, and then only barely.
There's another thing. Opterons are going to become dual-core in less than 2 years, with the same pinout as today. That means that if you have a lowly 2-way server that you're thinking about dumping, you can buy new dual-core Opterons and instantly get a 4-way out of your old 2-way server. Also, Opterons can access linearly up to 1Tb of physical RAM (that's 1,024 Gb), and up to 256Tb of virtual memory. And, finally, it's the only 64-bit processor you can get today that works with all your 32-bit x86 software. Finally, Opterons consume less energy than equivalent Xeons or Itaniums, and this becomes very important when thinking about A/C, UPS, standby power generators, etc.
I'd recommend you go with Opteron. Check out some well known tier-2 vendors such as Angstrom, Appro or Verari. They all make excellent quality Opteron servers and workstations. If you want brand names (and are willing to pay for it), check out Sun, Hewlett Packard or IBM for 2-way servers, or HP for a 4-way. IBM even has a dual Opteron workstation, if that's what you want.
Good Luck,
Marcos
This problem does not arise however when we use 'double long' formats, or 64-bit floats, because these are way more precise and still can go a long way when 32-bit doubles already jump to zero, thus causing the problems.
On the x86 architecture, "long double" is 80-bit, and not 64-bit, which is plain "double". "float" is 32-bit.
However, note that the x86 does all floating point operations with 80-bit precision. So you don't get any performance advantage from using only single precision variables (other than lower memory bandwidth usage). Thus, a good rule of thumb is to always use double (long double might be better but isn't portable, and SSE doesn't support it if you want to use that). Single precision is mainly useful when you want to store large amounts of data (remember to cast the part of the data you're working on to double before calculating).
As others have pointed out, currently the Opteron is quite unbeatable in price/performance. 10000 EUR should certainly get you a 2 cpu system. Probably not 4 cpu:s though? Given that you need lots of memory, especially avoid the Xeon (or some other 32-bit architecture). Linux can only give 3 GB to one process with it's default configuration (I guess windows is similar?). With the so-called 4g/4g patch you can allow 4 GB for each process, but the price is lower performance. With a 64-bit architecture all those problems disappear.