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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.
i almost cared just then, for a second
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?
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So should I save up for an Intel processor or buy 2 AMD machines?
Omnis amans amens
for this, but:
"..No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though."
Why oh why do we continually have "reviews" posted that aren't comprehensive? Hell, i hardly even click on any of the posted reviews anymore...just read the comments later and find out what was missed or just plain wrong in the review.
Where does one go to get the real, straight scoop other than buying both, testing all products involved?
Yeah, i'm a little grouchy this morning...had to get that one out.
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?
For one the Xeon has more L2 cache and for another most of the math benchmarks looked to be integer based. The Xeon gets beat in POVray wich is FPU intensive if im am not much mistaken... I think it is unfair to say the FPU on the Xeon is better...
I would be nice to see more non-synthetic benchmarks.
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.
I think this sums it up (besides the fact Intel kicked their pants). The AMD is running at 2.2 ghz, and retails $500 less. To me this says AMD is working smarter and Intel is working harder. Intel is reaching a (transient) ceiling with their clockspeeds and one day AMD will catch up to it. It will be interesting to see if Intel's multicore plan kicks as much ass as they are presently hoping. It'll also be interesting to see AMDs attempt at the same.
Personally I'm rooting for both. If either company gets screwed, we're all screwed.
Where are the FPU intensive benchmarks that the Athlon is trounced in?
Under normal circumstances a prime finder application does not use the FPU. And I also doubt that the super_pi application uses the FPU. However the powray benchmark (which actually uses the FPU), is one of the benchmarks where the Athlon wins.
So it would seem that it is the Integer benchmarks where the Athlon looses, instead. This also corresponds with how the normal Athlon fares against the normal Pentium.
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...
They have a cross licence agreement, so each one has what the other has in production in the term of 6 to 9 months. That is why we see the SSE in AMD processors, and AMD64 instruction in Intel64 processors.
t s/ amd/intel.license.2001.01.01.html
http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/agreemen
So I don't see any problem fro AMD in licensing the cp-processor.
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"
In other news, a Corvette just smooooookkkked a Ford Taurus.
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My guess is that if these same benchmarks had been run on any Athlon vs. the equivalent P4 throughout history, the outcome would've been similar. But the results would also have been as irrelevant yesterday as they are today, since we all know the Xeon isn't 40% faster than the A64 in anything like real-world usage.
The human eye pretty much stops distinguishing framerate past 30fps
Everytime I here this I cringe. The human eye can most certainly distiguish beyond 30fps, especially when it comes to crisp computer graphics. Most people who believe that 30fps is the limit is because that is what film is usually the rate with which film is displayed. However, if you notice film, you often have blurring around the actual sharp image (including CGI movies). This is because they eye normally sees a slightly blurred image do to the way the chemical receptors are fired in the eye. Therefore they look more like you see in the world. However, computers are different in that they don't usually have this blur. Without the blur, a lot more frames are needed so that the eye blur occurs correctly rather then lots of little snap shots. I myself can tell the difference between a 60fps image and a 75 fps image. I can tell the difference all the way up to 110 fps where it gets hard. I've run into people though who had trouble with telling the difference between 30fps and 40fps. So a lot of it depends on the person. However, we shouldn't cripple everyone for some.
Reserved Word.
Xeon = 3.6 GHz, A64 = PR 3500
Xeon = Server, A64 = desktop
Xeon = L3 cache 1MB, A64 = L3 Cache 512K
Xeon = $??? (probably > 800 when available), A64 = $345 (pricewatch)
Xeon = fastest of Intel's 64-bit chips, A64 = slowest of AMD's 64-bit chips
Anandtech = sold down the river? What the hell?
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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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.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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.
I though that these benchmarks looked a little strange when you're using Jack the Ripper as one of your major comparisons. There's a nice thread going on over at Ace's bashing the benchmarks, including a post from the author of the chess benchmark stating:
this test they did was flawed in all respects.
The act of using a 3500+ instead of an Opteron 150 is a minor issue.
/dev/null, and retest both machines.
The major issue is that Anandtech does not know how to compile software.
The Makefile used for TSCP on the A64 is broken, and does not apply -O2 optimization at the right stage.
My A64 3200+ scores 290K n/s when -O2 is properly applied.
On "primegen" most of the time is spent in putchar(), instead of in computation, and they should comment out the putchar() loop instead of directing output to
Also, they should have edited conf-cc and turned on -O2 optimization.
ubench is known to be buggy, and the AMD64 results have been questioned on other sites as being implausibly bad.
They copied their data wrong on the first database test. The A64 3500+ times in at 215 in 64b mode, beating the 3.6 GHz Nocona.
Their encoding benchmarks are equally suspicious.
And gzip was a 32bit executable.
In short, this "review" is HORRENDOUS, and filled with errors. A64 3500+ vs. Opteron 150 is a distraction from the real problem:
These guys don't know how to compile, optimize, and benchmark software.