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AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout
CrzyP writes "AnandTech puts the latest and greatest AMD and Intel CPUs, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions, to the test in their first ever "Linux Desktop CPU Roundup" to see which performs the best in various Linux applications including database, compiling, rendering, encryption, and more. They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance". Very informative!"
Everyone KNOWS that for the best Linux performance you must use a specially optimized compile with Gentoo! It's a FACT!
move along. Or at least that's what we were told when we clicked on this article. A bug in the slashcode?
So, isn't there some Bias here ?
We associated so much Intel and Windows in the past that it now seems obvious that AMD is better for Linux ?
Just a question, I have not checked the thoroughness of these tests.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I've always been an AMD fan, this just confirms my beliefs and makes my next processor being an AMD processor decision final. Anyone know why an AMD 2400+ would be running at over 50 degrees Celsius? Check the fan and the case is at around 30 degrees Celsius.
Aside from the few times Intel released a great overclocker, I have never seen a lower-priced Intel processor beat a higher-priced AMD processor in any significant set of benchmarks..
AMD4tw!
Yet, benchmarks, until recently, always seemed to compare same clock speeds/ratings despite Intel's offerings always costing more. It's nice they're starting to be more fair to AMD.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560
Well yea. The AMD has more and bigger numbers. Its got to be gooder.
So this latest benchmark suggests that HyperThreading doesn't do a whole lot. Is this the case on all unixy systems (ie: is HT geared more to Windows?) or is lacklustre performance on Windows the case as well?
I'm leaning heavily to the AMD 64 stuff for my next home unixy machine, any arguments for the P4?
Trolling is a art,
Why am I surprised ?? :)
I don't have an enormous pile of money to shell out all over. AMD has always done everything I need for significantly less than anything Intel has offered.
Where are the opteron Vs IBM PPC 970 linux benchmarks? Who gives a fuck about Athlon64, I have one in my laptop to test binaries for our servers, not for performance.
Then... how is my Athlon 64 3200 running on an NForce3 based motherboard?
Because you probably have a crap heatsink/fan combo. If you like to live richly get a Swiftech MXV462-V series heatsink for it... Works wonder but it's damn pricey (around $50.00 for the heatsink itself, big heavy copper block with a few hundred rough surface aluminum spikes driven into it in a spherical layout)
s wiftech/mcx462-v/page2.htm
It also has one of the best mounting methods I've seen, no more screwdrivers prying against super strong springs in tight corners...
http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/heatsinks/
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Tired of clicking next page
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
The Price/Performace of a VIA C5 (or C7)would be interesting to see here. No, I don't expect it to come even close in 'horsepower' to the players, but it would be of great interest for low-cost server appliances of sorts.
Since you didn't read the article, why are you asking the question? The testing looked pretty thorough to me, and the analysis was reasonable.
And for the record, I know a number of AMD freaks. None of them are pro-AMD because of the Windows vs Linux thing. A few of them are anti-Intel, but some of them use Windows.
So at least among those I know who voice an opinion, your thesis rings false.
I don't know, but I know the fact that lots of linux stuff (Wine comes to mind) won't compile under AMD64 right now don't affect the results.
Anandtech really has AMD's cock buried firmly in their ass, dont they?
Did I understand that if I install the 64-bit of Debian on an Athlon 64 (754) system, I will not be able to use 32-bit applications and the 64 compiled programs are not always updated and not all of them are available? This is mainly for a workstation usage.
I am planning to upgrade in a few days to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.2 box.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Any article that bases its conclusions on price/performance ratios that leaves out AMD's socket 754 Athlon64s is overlooking a major contender. Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds and with the current generation of chips the dual-channel memory that s939 offers doesn't provide that much of a performance boost.
Some might say that the s754 chips are an upgradability dead end but most people aren't upgrading CPUs without replacing the motherboard & RAM anyways. A s939 chip doesn't really get you much more upgrade headroom since there are no 939 boards with PCI-Express and DDR2 on them anyways...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Hyperthreading lets the other thread use execution units that'd otherwise be empty due to pipeline bubbles. This makes a reasonable difference on many applications on the P4, due to its absurdly long pipeline. A more sensible pipeline length (i.e. an AMD processor) means there'll be less benefit to hyperthreading. I can't think of any good reason why the effects will be different between Windows and Linux.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
Namaste
Now you Gentoo pussies can mad me down...
That's a good one!
They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance".
Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but doesn't this suggest that I, as a geek who doesn't care about the value of my money, would get better performance with the Intel? Otherwise, they would just come right out and say that the AMD is the fastest of all processors, wouldn't they? I mean, I know that I would choose a DLP HDTV for "balancing price and performance", but that LCD is just so damn cool. Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll go read the article, but this sounds like some of that marketing speak we were recently warned about.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
I'd allow them to skip the Itanium processor line, but to skip the 64bit EM64T is quite odd for such a review. Handing the 64bit categories with no competition like that is almost a PR exercise. You might as well be throwing G5 performance numbers at x86 machines instead of consulting the POWER5 equivalents (closest competition).
The Swiftech MCX462-V (MVX does not exist afaik ;)) is not the best heatsink out there money can buy. There are a lot of others which beat the Swiftech in both performance, price and noise levels. I've done 2 AMD heatsink roundups, one of them was posted at /. here
:)
The latest update I made can be found here from August 2004 and includes tons of innovative Heatpipe coolers which deliver great performance at a lower price! can't beat that?
Look for a Thermalright SP-94 or Sharkoon HSP1 to get your AMD chilly
Argh! The test I as a Gentoo-user was most interested in, whether compiles are significantly faster w/ 64 bit, they didn't include. What a bummer. Does anyone out there have some anecdotal evidence (completely unscientific, I know) about this?
I would suggest the Zalman CNSP7000A-ALCU as being a more resonable alternative to the Swiftech. Note I'm talking about the -ALCU version, not the -CU. The pure copper -CU is a bit TOO heavy and you risk damaging your core when you move your system. For a few degrees higher temperature it's worth getting the cheaper -ALCU.
The unofficial
Gentoo doesn't do ANYTHING by default.
I'm sorry, but its hard to take a review seriously when they had text ads all over the top of the 'review' for their sale on AMD processors.
Secondly, looks like as usual, more people who don't knwo what they're doing conducting a review. Ok great, AMD does better on badly set up generically compiled system #114, what happens when you optimize the code, like when you use Gentoo?
LinuxHardware.org has just posted their version of this article which covers not only benchmarks performed under Gentoo Linux, but also a technology overview and Linux support of the hardware. Take a look: Intel's New Platform Verses AMD's 64-bit Prowess.
Maybe I'm blind (seems to be the case), but I stared at the OpenSSL graph results, and I see the opposite of what the written text claims about them both on the benchmark page and in the conclusion. The written statements were to the effect that the 64-bit binaries sucked and that it was probably because OpenSSL was so heavily 32-bit optimized - but when you mouse-over for the 64-bit OpenSSL graphs of AES and RSA, the 64-bit binary result numbers look like they're trouncing the 32-bit counterpart binary on the same processor, as well as everything else in the test. What gives?
11*43+456^2
According to the review, faster processors performed better than slower ones.
Gee, whodathunkit.
Recently posted: Intel's New Platform Verses AMD's 64-bit Prowess. Similar scope in benchmarks, perhaps better analyzed.
-- v --
I got stuck when I bought a 700MHz SlotA that I'm still using. I wanted to upgrade vs buying new for a long time but I can't. Now I'll be getting a 939 in the hope that I can drop in a dual-core in the future. Aside from that, you'd be correct. I don't see clock speeds increasing fast enough to offer significant upgrades before everything changes. If AMD64 gets in the 3-4GHz range, they'll probably be using DDR2 by then and require a board change which will then put you into PCIX graphics...
A more sensible pipeline length (i.e. an AMD processor) means there'll be less benefit to hyperthreading.
Actually, any processor with an "overabundance" of resources (say, if the Athlon 64 had 4 FPU and had HT) can make use of HyperThreading.
Simplistic example: In the P4 case, the pipeline is long (20 stages) and there are ~4 or so execution units. That's 80 things that can be in-flight that can have stalls. HyperThreading can help keep more of the 80 "things" doing something every clock than only one thread of execution.
If the Athlon 64 had 8 different ALU/FPUs or something, the odds are that some of them would be idle every clock (that's probably more than the instruction level parallelism in most code streams). If, say, 50% of them were idle at any given clock tick, then HyperThreading would be an option to keep them busy as well.
The benchmarks would be a lot more credible and useful if scripts and data could be downloaded and run by readers.
-jim
How little in the way of data analysis skills even tech savvy people have.
Mouse over to see the 64 bit results, on a different scale? Yuck.
Do the test 3 times and take the maximum? Yuck, how about the average?
Bar charts? With non-constant widths between factors? yuck.
I think probably 3 charts would have sufficed to show the whole thing. One showing total sum of time taken to run each of 3 suites: desktop, content, and benchmark, one color per suite.
One showing the effect of 32 vs 64 bits on processors capable of doing both.
One anova of DDR1 vs DDR2 (text) and of Hyperthreading vs. Not.
One plot of performance to price ratio for the best config of each processor.
And don't even get me started on the HINT benchmark (which is hard to get anymore I guess).
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
If we included the G5 in all future assessments of Linux, I suspect that we in the technical community could alter the workstation landscape, convincing more people to use Linux on the Apple G5-based workstations (yes, WORKSTATIONS). The G5 is based on the processor evaluated, by MicroDesign Resources, to be the best overall server processor of 2001 (?).
but Athlon is HOT! :-P
Did anyone else notive the Intel advert.
that appeared when you held your mouse
over the "compilling results" chart?
It actually covered the results!
AMD is doing something else. "Word of mouth" can be VERY powerful today. But I bet they'd be doing LOTSA publicity if the internet hadn't arrived yet.
Remember what the lack of marketing did to the Commodore Amiga (with its powerful Video Toaster), when IBM only made bleeps and creeps.
Think about it.
The trick is that AMD64 also runs 32-bit software very well and linux supports this. So, if you find software that doesn't run properly in the 64-bit environment, it's not the end of the world. You just compile as 32-bit code and it works.
Of course this means that you may end up with much of a 32-bit linux environment installed in addition to the 64-bit environment, but the fact is that just about every 64-bit operating system that tries to be compatible with 32-bit software shares the same deficiency. Disk space is cheap.
...a slightly larger roundup. xServe is supposedly the best bang for the buck when it comes to big cluster servers. How about: P4-, AMD-, G5-Linux roundup?
And my Athlon XP 3500+ on a SiS chipset motherboard?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Err... That would be a 2500+ of course.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Look for a Thermalright SP-94 or Sharkoon HSP1 to get your AMD chilly :)
actualy the Thermalright SP-94 is for socket 478 CPUs, he'd be after a Thermalright SP-97 for socket A CPUs. Sadly the SP-97 has been discontinued but he can probably find some around. That combined with a Panaflo or Vantec Tornado fan (depending on what performance/noise ratio he's after) will be the best air cooling solution for his socket A cpu. the Zalman CNSP7000A-ALCU is also a nice option if you're looking for a quiet, decent heatsink but sadly it cant compair with a SP-97/panaflo combo in terms of quietness/performance.
I don't know about that last part, but I would agree regarding the overlooking of the obvious. i.e. That by and large the P4 just works whereas the AMD64 is more of a headache. I went with a P4 last week. Worked great. Changed my mind because of noise and heat and returned it for an Athlon 64. The system ran slow, filesystems were corrupted when I could get a clean install, which took numerous attempts and required me to pull the ram. In the end I went back to the P4. It just works.
you're right about the SP-94, made a mistake, however afaik the SP-97 is still available, Thermalright's webpage says so, and hundreds of webshops still offer them for sale.
the Zalman CNSP7000A-ALCU is also a nice option if you're looking for a quiet, decent heatsink but sadly it cant compair with a SP-97/panaflo combo in terms of quietness/performance.
Shoot man you're comparing a $20 heatsink/fan combo, with a heatsink that's $50 alone. Unless you're getting a processor that costs $300+ I don't see why you would spend such a good fraction of it on the heatsink for marginal gain.
Oracle's 10g database does not seem to like AMD processors on a linux platform. There is definitely some lag time to a comparable intel proc. Has anyone seen any test results from Oracle of AMD vs. Intel?
gShares.net
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artlu.net
They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance" ... and this is also the result they'd also get if using them on Windows?
I don't see why it wouldn't anyway.
For personal use, Athlon's have almost always (at least since the first Athlon was released) had better "balance between price and performance".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Reson Amd chips run better when kernel is built for amd. Intel chips are the same. Benchmark total screwed up. But no more bias than windows vs linux ones it is always the wrong kernel.
Rebuilding the kernel to match process can give upto 40% speed boast depending on the processor.
Poor windows users never see there processor chip work to its best. Hypertheading disabled ment that intel did not stand a chance since Hyperthreading is required to make up for there lack of general performace(linux kernel does support Hyperthreading if it is build right).
Ever wondered why you have to add drivers to windows to use hyperthreading yep windows does not support it at all.
I've just built two 32-bit Athlon-based systems and couldn't be happier. For both, used an AthlonXP 2400 with an nForce mobo, the details of the two systems are different but basically everything worked perfectly on both boxes, both of which dual boot Windows and Linux. The economics are really compelling - you can get a virtually dirt cheap Athlon that easily competes with a fairly expensive P4 - I haven't checked out top end Athlons vs. top end P4s, but the low- to mid-range Athlons really rock for the dollar.
check out the pop-up window associated with the word Linux on the last page anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2213&p=10
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
I know that I shouldn't feel the trolls, but there are times when I just can't help myself.
"AMD is still having quiality control problems and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight."
Oh? I don't remember seeing anything about AMD having problems with their CPUs. I do, however, remember compiling a short list of problems Intel has had. Let's see if I can find it. Oh look, there it is! Intel churns out problem-ridden products just like anyone else. It's so funny to watch the fanboys go down in flames.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Never underestimate the power of dancing blue freaks. I would point out that Apple has put them to good use. Maybe synced to some better music though.
Maybe AMD should have some dancing green freaks for step "3." instead of word of mouth.
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I'd like to see something like this as well, with two incarnations:
1. a test based on what you could get for a certain amount of money
2. an all out test comparing the top of the line in each class
They shrug and download the ISO, pop it in their free machine and boot it up. They install it with ease, get a system running and are astounded at how much control they have over their system, and yet how easy it is to keep up and running: no rpm hell, no library fuckups and incongruities.
I know exactly what you mean! Isn't Slackware just great ?
It's really cool, but the Sparc port seems to have died out. There are various splackware builds out there, but not a whole lot of anything new.
There's always NetBSD, and what the heck, run it on Intel/AMD, too.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
How about my K6, running on an FIC VA-503+?
*rimshot*
Whoah. You must be pissing off the salesman where you buy your hardware.
I've never heard of them being that friendly about you flipping hardware back at them like that.
'No, I think I wanted it in blue. Can you repaint it one more time??'
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
It would make perfect sense to compare socket 939 Athlon64s to EM64T Pentium 4s on 925X chipset, but I don't think EM64T P4s are easy to get without purchasing a whole workstation (oddly, boxed EM64T P4s are available in Japan). Can't Anandtech mooch a CPU from Intel for review purposes?
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
No, they weren't pissed. Besides, it didn't work the second time. I'll admit the first time was my bad. I should have lived with my choice and just put a bit fan on a it, but the second time around it flat didn't work. And they have a 7-day no questions return policy. It's a major chain. PC Club. Very friendly and helpful.
Thing is, often for programs where performance really matters, the relevant routines are optimized to use all the available FP+int units for the target architecture. At least this is true for many games.
:).
I don't see how HT will help much in these cases and it might even be counterproductive.
Of course there are always cases where performance matters but they haven't got around to optimizing (e.g. OpenSSL).
As for programs where performance doesn't matter -it doesn't matter right?
They should have done a make -j 4 test or something, with HT and without HT.
Sure sounds like he got a dud Athlon 64 system that was flipped back to them by someone else - probably for not working properly.
Corrupt filesystems? Doh.
So to do a thorough evaluation of AMD vs Intel performance on Linux we need to compare with a G5?
That's just silly.
Advanced users are users too!
Yes, it has all the registers, etc.
FWIW, I work for AMD.
Erich Boleyn
Yeah slackware is great! Slackpacks kinda suck though.
Here is a list of the problems I've had that could be attributed to the use of AMD on my workstations:
Above space left intentionally blank.
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