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EM64T Xeon vs. Athlon 64 under Linux (AMD64)
legrimpeur writes "Anandtech has a nice performance comparison under Linux (AMD64) between the recently introduced 3.6GHz EM64T Xeon processor and an Athlon 64 3500+. It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks. No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though." Update: 08/09 23:34 GMT by T : As the Inquirer reports, many Anandtech readers take issue with the comparison.
The editors of Slashdot seem to love posting articles whose sole purpose is to evoke flame wars between Intel fans and AMD fans.
For what it's worth, I read the article and the processors seemed pretty well matched except for some "synthetic" benchmarks. I don't know much about the synthetic benchmarks that they used, but I have found that synthetic benchmarks are almost always biased in Intel's favor. Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel accidentally or is there some kind of conspiracy going on here? You be the judge.
Finally, to try to balance out the article submitter's inflammatory comments about the Athlon being "trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks", here is a nice paragraph from the article summary:
"That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less. Also, keep in mind that the AMD processor is clocked 1400MHz slower than the 3.6GHz Xeon. With only a few exceptions, the 3.6GHz Xeon outperformed our Athlon 64 3500+, whether or not the cost and thermal issues between these two processors are justifiable."
Obviously they are not comparing processors which have price parity, so one could spin this either as "look at how slow the Athlon is", or "look at how much money you have to spend to get an Intel chip that is faster than an Athlon", depending upon your bias.
I'm all for the best processor out there. If it is made by Intel, then so be it. This will just give AMD more reason to compete for my dollar.
Wouldn't the larger cahced Opteron, the product actually positioned by AMD to compete with the Xeon series processors, have been a better comparison?
Athlon64 are for desktop markets, Xeon are for server markets
for this comparison to be fair, Xeon should be compared to Opteron!
What you're looking for is value as well as how much power you need. When your computer is sitting most of the time, hardly doing anything, is dropping $500 on a faster processor really worth it. The human eye pretty much stops distinguishing framerate past 30fps, so, unless your hosting an intensive server or work platform, ensuring a non idle CPU, getting the Intel is just a matter of bragging rights.
Seriously, Anandtech should just never compare widely available hardware with totally unavailable hardware. And what's with using a 512KB cache, second-rank Athlon64 to compare with Intel's flagship worstation processor? How 'bout the 1MB-equipped Athlon64 FX, or more appropriately an Opteron 150 (in stock at online retailers for $600-$650).
The slowest Socket 939 Athlon versus the fastest Xeon available. PLus the SQL test of the Athlon were in 32bit, not 64 bit (which would have resulted in a win for the athlon).
Some of the other synthetic benchmarks also show slighly suspicious anomalies.
Plus were are the Nocoma 32bit benches? How are we supposed to see how performance improved in 64bit mode without comparison?
A good review would have pitched the 3.6Ghz nacoma vs an Opteron 150, would have tested both in 32 and 64 bit and tried to use some application benchmarks.
Not just picking some old scores out of the datadump to create a "shootout"
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Okay, this is a case where Slashdot readers are unduly cheering for the "underdog".
Case in point: It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks.
Why exactly is this disappointing? I mean, Intel released a faster chip. It may be more expensive than AMD's offering, but it will: (a) foster more competition, and (b) offer you a product (if you have to buy a computer right now) which appears to be faster in synthetic benchmark tests (whatever significance that may mean to you).
This isn't "disappointing". It's capitalism.
So you compare a highend server/workstation proc to a highend desktop proc. Sure the server chip will win the majority of the benchmarks.
Where are the 64bit benchmarks? They really didn't do any comparision to 32bit, so you can't say for sure if Intel implementation is good or not. Get the Opteron in there, do the same benchmarks in 32 and 64 modes and see if there is a difference. Also throw say 5 gigs of memory in the machines, that will see how each proc handles addressing above the 4gig limit.
This article should not have been posted here, or on Anandtech for that matter. It has already caused a riot over there, both in the comments section of the article, and the forums. This article was grotesquely sub-par for Anandtech, and should have been removed immediately. Several of us avid AT readers have spotted discrepencies in the charts, stats that are totally bogus in comparison to previous AT articles. Particularly the MySql chart. To put it simply, there is absolutely no way to compare those two chips, as someone in the forums put it, "It's like comparing apples to a slab of meat." The Xeon has double the cache, is double the price, and isa top end server chip, being compared to a midrange desktop chip. The two simply cannot be compared. The article should have included an FX chip and/or an Opteron 150. Discount the article entirely. Hardcore Intel fanboys have spoken out against this article, that should really tell you something.
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
I am always disappointed in these reviews because they alway address gaming and multimedia (which I understand are most important to the greatest amount of readers) but rarely address scientific computing. I am most interested in how fast my FORTRAN/C math-intensive code will run (I have seen examples where AMD gets beat soundly in the "FPU" benchmark, but kicks ass in ScienceMark).
AMD has been consistently good at scientific computing, but I haven't seen any performance specs for the 64-bit ones. Has anyone else?
Ed.
From the article: "That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less"
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To be fair, the Athlon64 processor compared is a 3500+, while Intel's is a 3.6GHz. So AMD chose to rate their processor at that performance level.
To be fair again, Xeons generally outperform Pentium 4s at the same clock speed, due to various things like more cache and hyperthreading (before Intel added it to the Pentium line). The Xeon is normally targetted for servers and high-end workstations.
Finally, at the end of the article, they promise to benchmark the Xeons against the Opterons.
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The second figure you quote is relevant. The first figure you quote is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's like getting excited because your Chevy V8 is only redlined at 5500 rpm, and if you could make it run at 8000 rpm it'd kick the ass of that Mazda rotary.
What matters in the end is how fast the computer in which the CPU is placed does what you want it to do, and how much the system costs (and possibly heat/fan noise and power consumption, if you care about that sort of thing). Everything else is just fanboy wankery.
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Taken from here
17 - Posted on Aug 9, 2004 at 5:32 AM by KristopherKubicki
The only reason we even put the 3500+ in there is cause we already had benchmarks for it.
Relax, its just a primer for future articles. A 3.6F is supposed to compare with a "3600+" rated Athlon 64 isnt it? Since we dont have a 3600+ the 3500+ should perform slightly lower? Isnt this what we expected? And for those of you who dont believe me, a 3.6GHz 1MB EM64T Nocona is *exactly* like a 3.6F.
I thougth the AMD chip did pretty damn good for costing $500 less!
Kristopher
"Math intensive" means floating point intensive, because that is all the math normal people do with their machines. Calculating Pi to a billion digits is not floating point math, it is integer math.
The "math intensive" benchmark in this setup was Povray, and there the Athlon 64 shined. A lot. lame is also a floating point heavy application, and both CPUs are close there.
gzip measure memory performance. Apparently, the dictionary fit completely into the cache of the Xeon. Not a fair test.
I cannot comment on MySQL performance. It should measure integer and memory performance, I would wildly guess.
Bernstein's prime sieve is also integer arithmetic . If you have a prime with 100 million digits, the action is mostly in the CPU caches. Again, no fair test.
The unfairness of the benchmark setup becomes particularly obvious when you look at the chess benchmark. Chess (and other game AI type problems) do a lot of unpredictable jumps. That's the weak side of Pentium 4, and that's why Athlon 64 has historically outperformed Pentium 4s by a WIDE margin. Look at the hardware used by the PC chess tournaments and the chess grandmasters and you see Athlon and Athlon 64 all the time. If Anand now measures that Athlon 64 is outperformed by a Xeon, then the test setup can not have been fair.
I don't know about ubench, never heard of it before.
Password cracking and encryption is 100% integer arithmetic. And it is one of the mainstays of Opterons from the beginning. Anands measurement flies in the face of that.
I call bullshit.
No it's not. There are different engineering trade-offs that were made. P4 traded IPC for clock-speed. AMD traded clock-speed for IPC. All that matters is what performs the best at the retail clock-speed.
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I think that the article demonstrates the effectiveness of cache for some applications. How much would you like to bet that the Xeon was able to run pretty much everything in cache where it won, and the Athlon 64 wasn't?
Very poor comparo.
Jonathan
HT not performing well is not surprising. It is a hack to overcome the limitation of the Pentium's long pipeline. If there are few branch prediction misses, it is going to take away a bit of processing power. One can think of it like have the processor's attention divided. Hyperthreading is like having two pipelines. One pipeline gets clogged (branch prediction missed) and the other can be worked on. Disable HT and and the procesor can narrowly focus on one pipeline.
So a lot of the synthetic benchmarks seem to be optimized for Intel's long pipeline.
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Strange, I though that overheating is the problem of the past, and manufacturers are making silent coolers. Of course if you have a paranoia you might install too many coolers. By the way if you will look in charts you'll see that amd procesors produce less heat...
As part of a larger project I've recently had to evaluate these two chips technologies. I've been benchmarking the AMD Opteron 246 (2.0 Ghz) against a 3.0Ghz Xeon with 64bit and hyperthreading extensions, using the the same top end memory config, same hard drives, etc.
With the overwhelming majority of our real-world custom application performance numbers, the Opteron system was the better performer by a wide margin.
I'd suggest if anyone is making a real decision about these chips, to test them out yourself under actual-use conditions.
This review is BS. Any running program which would not fit into the Athlon 64's 512KB cache but fit into the Xeon's 1MB cache would have much better performance. Case in point, I downloaded the Windows version of the tspc181 chess program used in the article, and it showed 644KB memory usage in Task Manager. This would explain the much better score of the Xeon, as the Athlon 64 would have to be constantly swapping with main memory while the Xeon ran from the cache. Any test like this will significantly skewer the results. A fairer comparision would be a 1 MB cache Opteron or FX vs the 1MB cache Xeon.
As almost any tech reviewer would have been aware of this, one can only wonder if some money changed hands, as this article seems to be intentionally slanted to make the Xeon look better then the Athlon 64. Also synthetic benchmarks in general tend to be very unreliable, and sometimes worthless, often slanted in design to favor one CPU or another, usually Intels, since they have the most money to throw around.
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This benchmark put up a server class CPU vs. a desktop class CPU. They should've put the Xeon up against an equivilant Opteron.
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This is the real compairson. Overclock the AMD to 3.6GHz and see who wins. As soon as AMD gets tthe 90nm process perfected I think we will see a huge boost in AMDs clockspeed.
This always annoys me...
You see, you can't buy an AMD at 3.6 GHz because it wasn't designed to run that fast. The AMD does more work per clock so it CAN'T run at 3.6GHz in 90nm. It is simply not designed to do so. The laws of physics prevent this.
The Intel CPU CAN run at 3.6GHz because it was DESIGNED to run at 3.6GHz AT THE COST of doing LESS work per clock.
If I had a CPU that could execute 2 instructions per clock at 1 GHz and another CPU that could execute 1 instruction per clock at 2 GHz, they would have the exact same performance.
They are different design styles. Sometimes the high frequency, lower-IPC approach is better, sometimes the lower frequency, higher-IPC approach is better. You can see this in the discrepency in performance of 2 CPUs with vastly different design tradeoffs.