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Intel Dual Core Xeon Benchmarked
An anonymous reader writes "A few weeks back, Intel launched a new dual core chip with little applause. It appears we know now why, as the chip has been benchmarked by the chaps at GamePC. In tests against the dual core AMD Opteron processor, Intel's new chip gets thoroughly thrashed, losing out in terms of raw performance while eating a lot more power. "
Got through several pages of the benchmarking before it appeared /.ed.
First concern is that though the chip has been released, motherboards configured for it aren't close to release yet. I'd rather see it benchmarked as distributed, since that's what really matters to the end user.
Second concern is power usage and heat production. If you can't make a chip as powerful as your competitors, you better make sure it is not as expensive to operate. Really, why would someone choose to use a chip that is less powerful, intrinsically costs more to operate, and costs more to cool? Chips are cheap enough that the operating costs are often now more expensive than initial cost.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Intel is notorious for "Unnouncements". They will simply unnounce some strange new technology that is "coming real soon now" but they will leave out all of the details. This might just keep Dell from leaving them.
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Is GamePC the best place to read benchmarks on a dual core Intel Xeon chip? The article appears to be /.ed already (or just REAAALY slow at my end) so I can't read the results, but I can't help but think somewhere called GamePC isn't exactly Intel's target audience here.
We all know AMD's dual core lineup trashes intel.
I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive.
I've yet to see a mainstream PC with a dual-core AMD on the other hand.
You would think with all their resources intel could start to make a chip to compete with AMD.
Its really surprising to think AMD blind-sided intel this badly (multi-core/x64), but I guess they really did. Good for them, and great for us. Once again supply and demand in the free market prevails.
Dell is locked into Intel and they really needed dual core, so there it is.
Why do they always do gaming as the benchmark? It's a server processor!!! Do some crypto!
:-) Shameless plug but also good numbers when doing RSA work I guess.
Check this out image where "nocona" is a Pentium 820D [dual-core 64-bit P4].
Those are cycle counts for RSA-x private key operations [with padding] on various processors.
TFM == tomsfastmath
LTM == libtommath
DC == dual-core [two threaded] tomsfastmath
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Intel's sales will again beat AMD's by several fold.
Perhaps, although AMD has made impressive inroads into the server/enterprise marketplace and there's no sign of it slowing down.
The reason seems to be that most PC and server purchases are not intended for games, beyond Solitare of course,
Non sequitur, Opterons smoke Xeons at enterprise tasks like web serving, database hosting and so on, in almost every benchmark. Especially in the more enterprise-relevant 2-way and 4-way (4 or 8 core) configurations.
and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
RTFA. For several YEARS AMD's chips have been lower power and cooler than Intel's - a combination of doing more work at lower clock frequencies, and SOI. You're recalling something from the K6 days that is totally backwards today.
AMD should be happy they ran Cyrix out of the business but, they should have realized by now that they will not impact Intel sales no matter how vocal their fanboys might be.
AMD has already impacted Intel's sales in a big way. Did you hear about Intel's disappointing earnings today? Even worse for Intel, AMD has *creamed* the Itanium. Now 90% of what were potential Itanium customers (big bucks for Intel) are now going to do AMD64 instead...even if it happens to run on Intel silicon. Itanium is a financial and technical disaster for Intel.
Remember the days when AMD cloned Intel's instruction sets, not vice versa?
BTW, could I borrow your Opteron, I need to fry an egg for breakfast.
Wow, how...witty. At any rate, looks like Xeons are the hot ticket there... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Not just that. The AMD dualcore chips have an on-chip connection between the cores: both cores share a crossbar fronting the memory controllers and have the on-chip equivalent of a coherent HyperTransport connection. So, you see, the AMD design is in fact a real dual-core design. The current Intel dual-cores, on the other hand, share nothing on-chip.
This is exactly right. It is really surprising that Intel has focussed so completely, almost obessively, and for so long, on the problem of supplying the maximum number of work-cycles per unit of time (GHZ, Pipelining, Itanium's EPIC design) while seemingly paying so little attention to supply-of-work-to-do (FSB speed and architecture)
AMD has paid quite a bit of attention to the work-supply and has a much more efficiently balanced work-cycle-supply/ data-for-work design. http://www.hypertransport.org/ gives AMD a big leg-up over Intel.
If Intel fails to do something spectacular to FSB speeds, AMD is sure to continue to pull away from Intel. The more cores and threads per CPU, the greater AMD's lead over Intel will become (at least from a performance point of view), until Intel addresses this problem.