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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.
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.
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.
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.