The Top CPUs Under Linux

Linux Hack writes "LinuxHardware.org has published their latest review and this one covers the top processors from both the big x86 manufacturers. If you want to see who's on top under Linux, you should check out this review. There's something here for both Intel and AMD fanboys!"

Comments

Why x86 only?

[TheRaven64]

Most (All?) of their benchmarks were running open source code. Surely they could have managed to test a few other CPU architectures. Of course, then the compiler optimisation would have come in, but that's understandable. If you're looking for a machine to run Linux on, then x86 isn't necessarily a requirement - and if it wins on performance or price / performance then that would be an interesting result.

Farked if you do, or not

[suitepotato]

So it is either put up with an Intel hotplate or put up with the cost of an AMD chip. Is that what I am reading there?

What I want is a chip that is fast, doesn't incinerate itself without a coolant system akin to that of a helium liquefaction plant, and doesn't cost more than two off-the-shelf boxes which I could yoke together with clustering.

I mean, isn't that massive parallelism ability of Linux clustering one of the things that makes this whole CPU arms races less relevant? I'd rather buy a bunch of 1.8Ghz Intel 1U rack units than a couple high-end multi-core machines.

specviewperf

[bloosqr]

I was curious how the opteron compares to the amd64 so I hunted around a bit. I couldn't find the other tests but I found the specviewperf tests on amd's own site.

While those may be the 8.0 tests as opposed to the 8.0.1 tests, it strikes me that the testing on linuxhardware looks a bit funny. The benchmarks on AMD's site are for the opteron 150 and the piv 3.4 ghz (w/ 1 mb of l2 cache). The ratings are about neck and neck on the amd site but about twice the speed as on linuxhardware's site.

The actual piv that linuxhardware test actually (model 670, piv) has 2 mb of l2 cache and clocks in at 3.8 ghz and for some reason is slower than what AMD got on for a slower chip?

This may be a compiler issue, which at the end of the day says benchmarks are meaningless until you use the right compilers

before anyone responds to this by saying well they used the same compiler so it is a fair benchmark, it is not. That benchmark tells you how long the compiler people spent optimizing for a particular chip in contrast to another chip.