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Linux Shootout: Opteron 150 vs. Xeon 3.6GHz Nocona
danalien writes "Anandtech with their previous review have stirred up a bit of controversy, and they've released their follow-up review where they pit AMD's Opteron 150 vs Intel's Xeon 3.6 Nocona (on linux)."
Athlon 64 is the name used for the desktop line, and Opteron is the name used for the server/workstation processors.
Athlon64 3000+ (2GHz): $167
Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition: $1025
Provided you have a NUMA-aware operating system, that is. The OS needs to know which memory is attached to which processor, since access to memory attached to the same processor on which a thread is running will obviously be faster and lower latency than going across hypertransport to a different processor and waiting for an answer.
that's interesting that you say this, because just about every gaming beckmark and time demo clearly shows that the athlon64 is far superior to the pentium4 in gaming, and that's with comparing a 2ghz a64 and a 3.2ghz p4...
After all is said and done it became difficult (nearly impossible?) to justify the Xeon processor in a UP configuration over the Opteron 150,
Huh? Here are some numbers:
- POV-Ray 3.50c: Opteron is 40% faster
- Crafty v19.15: Opteron is 70% faster
- TSCP: 10% faster
- PostgresSQL test-insert and test-select: Opteron takes 60% of the time it takes Xeon
- MySQL test-insert: Opteron takes 80% of the time it takes Xeon.
In almost every benchmark, where proper optimizations are used (and why shouldn't they be? Who in his/her right mind would not use proper optimizations??), the Opteron destroys the Xeon.You seem to be confused about the MHz thing ... an Opteron with the same clock frequency would win every benchmark against a P4: An Athlon 64 at 2 Ghz is faster than a 3.4 Ghz P4 in many benchmarks (and slower in others). Intel's design makes very high clock frequencies possible, but at the expense of a very long pipeline, which hurts applications with many branches or unplanned memory accesses.
If you really need high performance, you'll have to try and figure out the performance for the specific application you need.
A rough summary (when comparing processors with the same rating, not same clock frequency):
The Athlon 64 wins most gaming benchmarks against the P4.
The Athlon (and especially the Opteron with its larger chache) dominates database benchmarks.
Things are very different with video encoding - there Intel usually wins.
There are older dual and quad Opteron vs Xeon reviews around.
Humorously, the also say this:
Now we know that the Nocona is here, and it's getting slaughtered at the Altar of The Opteron.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
How do they know? By cache coherence signals transferred between the CPUs. This isn't free and consumes bus bandwidth.
The first CPU can't "instantly" write the value either, because it must first obtain exclusive ownership of that cache line by checking with the other CPUs.
On the Opteron architecture (we call this NUMA, or "point-to-point"), as soon as one CPU writes a value to the 'GO!!' area, well, that's _just the beginning_. It has to tell another CPU in the system that it just did that. etc etc
It has to use some communication resource to update the other CPUs on the state of that cache line. Just like the bus-based situation.
Other than a few benchmarks that were either synthetic or not compiled specifically for the processor, AMD whooped Intel's ass. Some of the gains were quite significant.
However, this speed increase seems to depend on being able to compile your software from scratch which is generally unknown in the windows world. That should change in the future, but for now it's still a tough call whether or not to buy one now. But if you're running gentoo, let the funroll-loops begin!
This still leaves me wondering why an Opteron 250 (2.4GHz, 1MB L2 cache) seems to so seriously outperform an Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz, 512KB L2 cache).
When people says that the first article was bad, it's because it was really bad: 64-bit binaries for Intel vs. 32-bit binaries for AMD, copy&pasted benchmark results from previous 32-bit benchmarks, tests (PI digit computation) that measured the libc optimization instead of the actual benchmark (when removing the printf() it got about a 10x boost). People on aceshardware forums were posting TSCP scores about 2x what Anandtech got, on the same processor. So the A64 3500+ scores you saw in that article are trash. Forget them.
Hypterthreading doesn't cut the L2 cache in half. At least not statically, it is possible that if you're unlucky it will indeed look like each process will only have half the cache.
The critical point being that Opterons unlike there Athlon 64 cousins have more hyper-transport interfaces, allowing them to be used in a multy-processor enviroment, depending on the seriese number up to 8-way systems can be built, though I think the largest Tyan's only carry 4 at present.
There's other minor diferences but *goes off dreaming about a 4-way processor in a database server*
quoted in the submissionn dex.cfm?acti on=detail&PostNum=2527&Thread=1&entryID=35446&room ID=11
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/i
hasn't been rejected yet, still pending, but no doubt will be.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
What about Solaris, IRIX, AIX, etc.?
UltraSPARCs have been running with memory local to CPUs for quite a while now, for example.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I wouldn't touch VIA and SIS with a ten foot pole for my own systems, even less for servers. Plenty of bad experiences.
While in the past VIA and SIS have been really bad chipsets, modern VIA chipsets (KT266A and up) are rock stable and perform well. I have had both KT333 and KT600 boards which have never failed. SIS, while I have no first hand experience, I am told is similar.
Perhaps this is what you are looking for
The design intended to become the Pentium 5 (Tejas) was cancelled in favour of Pentium M derivatives. Intel basically had to give up on the Netburst micro-architecture and is now concentrating on increased parallelism (multiple cores) rather than extreme clock rates.
I bought a board with a SiS 745 chipset and it has been perfect, at least under windows. They provide a nice dual-channel PCI bus, even. SiS used to be a horrible joke but they've come a long, long way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Synthetic benchmarks like SPEC often give very different results to real world applications. The fact that the Opteron is faster in the SPEC benchmarks and many real-world tests speaks for itself.
Stick Men
Well, while Solaris is *technically* going to be ported to x86-64 eventually... IRIX and AIX won't for sure.
The way the opteron numbering system works is the first number is the amount of CPUs you can run SMP. The 150 is the fastest single CPU you can buy right now, the 850 is running at same clock rate as the 150 but can run in an 8way opteron system (if the boards ever become available). Right now you'd mainly find the 850s in a 4way system. The 850 would definitely be the most expensive opteron, but as a single chip would perform the same as the 150.
Very interesting. When I was in grad school, my research group did full custom designs with Cadance. When they finally got a copy of the tools for x86, they tested a Xeon 2.4 against a $60,000 Sun V880. Sure enough, 100% improvement on x86(5 minute DRCs down from 11 minutes). They only use the Suns now for the really large design that needs more than 4GB memory.
> As it is now, the CPU boots in 16 bit real mode, then you switch to 32 bit protected mode, and only after that have been done you can switch the CPU into 64 bit mode.
This is no different from any other CPU existing in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. PowerPC, SPARC and MIPS all boot into 32-bit physically addressed mode, then have to switch into 64-bit paged mode once the OS starts.
The only chips that don't are pure 64-bit devices like Alpha and IA-64.