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. "

Comments

Stupid pre-retail release

[dada21]

This release seems dumb for Intel. No optimized motherboards, outrageous power requirements and a really inefficient core? It isn't even alpha-release worthy. Why would Intel release a product that is just waiting for a poor review? Is the high end market that hungry?

The article didn't need 15 pages to explain Intel's mistakes. Intel will lose more customers to AMD than if they had waited until they had a viable and competitive product.

400W while idling? For sub-standard performance? Yay.

Re:Stupid pre-retail release

[Ihlosi]

Is the high end market that hungry?

No, the high-end market is waiting for something that has "Intel" and "Dual Core" written all over it. Everything else is irrelevant.

Wow

[Canadian_Daemon]

From the article... 4 cores with 4 Virtual CPU's. What a beast. And they even talk about licensing issues
we were curious if having eight processors (four physical cores + four virtual processors) would cause operating system-related licensing issues. After all, even multi-threaded operating systems like Windows XP Professional are sold with a "2 Processor" limitation. While technically the system still only has two physical processors, dual-core and Hyper-Threading technologies are certainly pushing this limitation further than Microsoft originally intended.
I find it interesting how, in a world of IP, somebody out there ( Intel ) can still 'cheat' the system by creating dual core CPU's which still count as a single processor, thus allowing for a system like this.

Redheaded stepchild?

[Holi]

How can you call the most prevalent x86 server cpu the redheaded step child. I would say the itanium was the redheaded stepchild not the popular xeon.

Who would be suprised?

[cybrthng]

Intel is engineering for it's next gen chips that are still vaporware as far as i'm concerned. AMD put out some great technology that works today.

The big question will be who is the leader next year! As far as i'm concerned the opteron/amd64 has already proven intself against p4/xeon arch and it's up to the next gen chips to see who will stomp on who.

Will AMD pull some new tech? Will Intel be able to deliver or will sun come around and smack everyone with the new Niagra chips?

Intel is all about the Mhz

[mahdi13]

Intel has been really slacking more and more since AMD beat them in the 1GHz race. After that Intel has seemingly been focusing on making the 'fastest processor' and not improving on the design much.

It seems to me that Intel procs these days are more of the same but overclocked; while AMD has been making their procs more efficient, by running cooler and streamlining the instructions.

Faster isn't better these days and Intel needs to realize this before it's too late.
I just picked up a +3200 AMD Sempron which is clocked at 1.8Ghz and compre that to the AthlonXP +1600 at 1.4Ghz I had before, it has well over double the perfomance in almost every application. From doubling the fps in Doom3 to cutting compile times down by half. For a 400Mhz difference there is a lot more going on then just 'speed'

Re:Intel is all about the Mhz

[dpilot]

Both parent post and grandparent post are making the mistake of assuming Intel's current problems are technical, and the result of engineering. That's utterly wrong, the problem is higher up - a product of corporate culture, management, and myopia.

Since you brought up IA64...
While I'd be one of the last to argue against the ugliness of the x86 instruction set, that does not mean that IA64 is necessarily better. From an instruction architecture point of view, IMHO IA64 looks like an academic exercise got sold to the executives well before it was really ready for prime time. Look at the sheer amount of money Intel and HP have dumped into IA64, Sure, they can get some impressive results, but I suspect that given THAT amount of cash, time, and engineering, x86, Alpha, Power, etc all could have reached at least the same performance level.

It's necessary to realize that the number 1 problem it was designed for had nothing whatsoever to do with performance. IMHO, the prime purpose of IA64 was to prevent cloning. Neither Intel nor HP hold any of the IP on IA64 - it's all held by a third company, and Intel and HP are the licensees. That's because both Intel and HP are extensively cross-licensed with others in the business, including AMD. Had Intel and HP owned the IP for IA64, it would have come in under those cross-licensing agreements. By setting up the third company, there is no cross-licensing involved, and ONLY Intel and HP can product IA64.

So IA64 is a product of "corporate myopia," of Intel being more concerned about it's internal problem of cloning than customers' external problems of power and performance, and I once heard it was another attempt by Carly Fiorina to "reset the clock" on her tenure by announcing a grand new strategy that needed her at the helm. Both are driven by internal politics, not the marketplace. It's a classic problem of big companies

Re:Intel is all about the Mhz

[Eukariote]

Yeah, Intel is stupid. Their engineers didn't realize that their obviously-old netburst architecture couldn't compete against amd. How idiots they were.

Aside from the feeble attempt at sarcasm, the above does raise a serious question: were their engineers really that dumb? No, but they were not given a voice

Intel's troubles were caused by hubris and marketing-driven decisions on the part of management. They went for the NetBurst/P4 design because MHz sells. They ignored warnings by the process specialists about the risks of such a high-frequency design. They assumed they had the monopoly power to move the market over to Itanium, and thus did not start planning an 80x86 design beyond NetBurst/P4 until AMD scared the shit out of them with Opteron/K8.

It could have been much worse, even. The Pentium-M was a semi-skunkworks project by their Israeli design team. It is an evolution of the old PIII architecture. Without it, they would have been trounced in the mobile space, and would have had nothing to plug the gap between now and their wholly new architecture which is expected late 2006.

HORUS

[Anonymous Coward]

These have been availible in Dell servers for a while now according to the online store. Intel are truly screwed for at least the next 6-12 months by the looks of things unless they are hiding something seriously good. I had thought that perhaps they had been based on Apple's decision to switch, it looks like they might just be pretending to be better than they really are though.

AMD looks like it's going to continue to be the winner on performance for the foreseeable future, especially with it's totally awesome HORUS chipset on the horizon which might just hail the beginning of commodity super computing.

For anyone wondering what HORUS is, it's an SMP system that can link 4 Opteron's together over HTT. The real killer is that it can it's self be linked to 4 other HORUS chips over InfiniBand. A HORUS SMP system appears as another Opteron chip to the other HORUS groups. AMDs current plans are for HORUS to scale to 32 CPUs in a hot swappable configuration. It's going to be great.

xeon has no chance vs opteron..

[aachrisg]

..as long as opteron has seperate ram (chips+bus) for each CPU and xeon doesn't. I assume intel knows this.

Re: $700 - correction

[Glock27]

I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in ~$700 PCs. From that angle Intel absolutely devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive.

You're talking about Pentium-D of course, not Xeon...

At any rate, that is actually bad for Intel. AMD brought out enterprise-class dual core CPUs that have obvious applications on workstations/servers, which run lots of tasks and threads, and can always use more horsepower for higher throughput. Intel brought out, at about the same time, the Pentium-D for consumers. Not only is it clocked at about 1 GHz. slower than the fastest single-core Pentium, but desktop PCs don't typically run large thread and process workloads like servers. In fact, the Pentium D runs games substantially slower than cheaper, single-core Pentia. So, I expect a lot of consumers are out there scratching there heads over whether or not to buy Pentium-D.

AMD's dual core chips, on the other hand, only run 200 MHz. slower than the corresponding single core chip. Game performance suffers hardly at all. AMD will ramp up production of dual-core consumer chips once it feels it has a firm hold on the workstation/server side. Then we'll see the prices drop, and dual core will become mainstream. Maybe game developers will even start programming multithreaded games. ;-)

In summary, AMD is laughing all the way to the bank, while Intel has to content itself with low consumer product profit margins. It seems this new Xeon won't change that dynamic much.

Intel - Itanium and r&d resources vs. x86

[acomj]

Its pretty clear that intel is sliding in the x86 race. The reason has to do with development cycles and all the work and money Intel spent on that risky itanium venture. Itanium diverted R&D funds from x86 and when Itanium failed in the market place, intel wasn't working hard enough on x86 and fell behind.

The next generation of chips may be different. Competetion is good.

  I'm pretty chip agnostic, although a while back I had an cyrix 486 chip in a notebook and didn't even know it wasn't an intel.

Re:Why always gaming?

[tomstdenis]

Um, it isn't hard to make Intel look bad.

Go to the store, buy two boxes, one an Intel Pentium 620, another an AMD Athlon64 3200+ or so [roughly price compariable I think].

Grab two blank hard disks, two gentoo cds and one local distfile mirror. Start from stage1 and build a good 700 or so packages. Tell me how many ***hours*** of work you can complete on the AMD box before the Intel box is even finished.

Not fair enough? Ok, try measuring the latency of ECC P-256 and RSA-2048 operations with the fastest code you can write for both [include the time it takes to write both as a cost].

Not fair enough? Compare the energy consumed in doing these tasks.

etc...

Tom

Xeon, Opteron, Chipsets and the Busses

[hirschma]

I'm a huge AMD fan, and almost all of my machines are running either A64's or Opterons. But when it was time to build a file server, I went Xeon.

Why? No one offers a motherboard like this on the AMD side of things. The Tyan mobo just sprouts high-speed expansion busses, perfect for a box that will have multiple bonded gigE adatpers, multiple RAID controllers, etc. And everything was recognized by Linux the first time - total piece of cake install. This is because Intel makes **excellent** supporting chipsets that have all of their features well supported by Linux.

AMD boxes need more attention during install for things like gigE controllers and the like - at least that's been my experience. NVidia chipsets are simply not fully supported, and I'm not going to trust backwards-engineered stuff or binary-only releases over Intel-supplied, in-kernel drivers. VIA doesn't make really high-perfomance stuff, either, or at the very least no one is offering it as such.

Sorry, AMD, but until you continuously offer your own chipsets that offer all the options under Linux (and not rely on erstwhile partners like VIA and NVidia), Intel is going to continue to dominate. Intel makes motherboards and chipsets for a reason.

jh

Re:I'm kinda shocked...

[leathered]

Exactly. And PHBs everywhere will lap them up because 'no one ever got fired for buying Intel'.

But the PHBs don't have to work with the shit like their techies do. I work in in an all Dell shop and it's staggering how the quality of their desktops and more recently their servers has declined lately. And Intel has to partly shoulder the blame because these machines run hot. So hot that our air-con in the server rooom can't cope with the flames our new racks throw out.

But it would be a brave techie to stand up in a management meeting and suggest buying AMD kit. As you said, Dell have filled the hole in their line-up and care little if the thing actually performs.