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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. "
yeah, but can it run Duke Nukem Forever?
I had been considering an Intel dual core but it sounds like I need to aim for an AMD instead.
Agile Artisans
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.
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.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
mmmm.. an apple with dual cores.. I'll have to get a new apple corer of course...
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
This is the 21st century in North America, since when do we care how much power a CPU uses. *Drives away in Hummer*
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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.
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?
http://www.gamepc.com.nyud.net:8090/labs/view_cont ent.asp?id=paxville&page=1
Seems it's slashdotted already after 8 posts. Finally when will all slashdot-links be coralized automatically?
Hello, Stock market? Please read slashdot. I need to sell my AMD stock and buy a new amp.
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.
Amd has thrashed intel for a few years now in terms of cpu performance so this is no surprise. What they really need to do is become more marking savvy. Most people don't know amd even makes chips. That includes many computer literate people as well, whereas even the luddites know who intel is
If you get an older version of Windows, that machine will count as having eight processors. With Windows XP, Microsoft has clarified their view, namely that they count sockets, not cores or virtual cores. So Intel isn't cheating on this, they are doing exactly what Microsoft wants.
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'
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Intel's sales will again beat AMD's by several fold. The reason seems to be that most PC and server purchases are not intended for games, beyond Solitare of course, and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
Did you miss the part where they said this chip consumes more power and runs hotter than Opterons?
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.
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.
WTF??? We're talking about servers, not laptops.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
...and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
/. and all, but next time you might want to try and RTFA.
I know this is
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
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
This is just about Intel Dual Core in general.
Intel knows AMD Opteron Dual Cores are faster. That's why this generation dual cores (at least P4D's) from Intel are so cheap aside from the ridiculous "Extreme Editions".
I recently bought a Dell computer. I had a choice of getting a dual core for $50 more. Now I can rip a CD to MP3's using EAC/LAME in about 3 minutes when it used to take 15 on my old computer. I'm happy with my $50 doubling my performance for MP3's and xVID (DivX) creation.
I really wanted a higher-performance dual core AMD computer but when I was pricing those out, the price of the upgrade to a dual core AMD *ALONE* was around the price of my entire Dell computer.
allow me to share my excitement.
:)
(points at intel)
MWA HA HA! HA HA!
MWA HA HA! HA HA!
Ah... felt so good. Thanks
..as long as opteron has seperate ram (chips+bus) for each CPU and xeon doesn't. I assume intel knows this.
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.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
The reason that Intel's dual core processors can sell for less than AMD's is the same reason they get thrashed; Intel dual cores are simply a normal Intel dual proc setup in one package, while AMD's dual cores have a single die. The Intel offerings use the woefully slow FSB for intercore communication, whilst AMD uses a dedicated, full-speed bus.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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.
Only they're not quite double the performance, because they share the memory bus. Any memory intensive application will hit contention between the 2 cores...
AMD have a faster memory interface to begin with, and in a multiprocessor system each processor has it`s own connection to memory...
Although the 2 cores on a single AMD processor share their connection to memory, they dont share with other chips in the same machine and their connection to memory is still faster than intel`s. Also AMD have an internal connection between the 2 cores on a single chip whereas intel`s chips need to go via the processor bus.
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Actually, you are wrong and you would not even have to read the article to check that. Both the dual-core Intel Xeon and the dual-core AMD Opteron are designed to work in a server environment. These are the chips that you find in the latest blade systems from several vendors (IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, etc.) and they are targetting big businesses, not the average consumer as you imply.
And the results are actually not good at all for Intel. "trashed" is not about 10% faster, but about a significant gap: 2 or 3 times faster in some tests for comparable chips. For other tests, the difference is smaller but still significant. Note that I am not talking specifically about the GamePC tests reported here, but also about other independant tests made with these new processors and focusing on server performance.
As I was involved in the decision process for purchasing several rather big blade systems for my company, I had meetings with all the big vendors (IBM, HP, Sun) and several smaller ones. In our meeting with Dell, they had invited a technical expert from Intel who was there to defend their dual-core CPUs and present the roadmap for their future chips. Well, after I asked some technical questions about the memory management and the performance of the Intel Xeons compared to AMD Opterons in dual-core dual-CPU environments, the statement from the Intel guy was memorable: "I think that we are more or less on par with AMD now." Coming from the incumbent and knowing that the vendors always exagerate their claims, this very weak statement was really telling a lot about where Intel stands today in the server market. They are lagging behind and they know it. For the 64-bit area, they bet the ship on Itanium/Itanium2 but AMD blew them away with the Opteron and they still haven't been able to catch up in terms of performance and power consumption. Needless to say, in the end we ditched Dell (even if they had good prices) because the Xeon-based systems did not match our performance requirements. We picked another vendor instead, and went with dual-core Opterons.
BTW, could I borrow your Opteron, I need to fry an egg for breakfast.
The 90's called. They need their processor bigotry back.
Additionnally to what other have said, I may add :
- HyperThreading is Intel's name for Simultaneous Multithreading.
Basically, a CPU isn't always using 100% of all its function.
The CPU may be waiting for something in the cache.
Or the application is maybe using only a small portion of the CPU.
In other words, the CPU waste its time sitting and doing nothing.
If you manage to use those unused ressource, you can squeeze more performance out of your CPU.
Before Simultaneous Multithreading, the only way to do so is "Out-of-Order" execution.
- In plain english : maybe some of the next steps of the programm don't need to wait the curent stuff to finish, and we may already fill unused parts of the CPU with these instruction.
With Simultaneous Multithreading, this time, you're trying to find something for your CPU to do from *another program*. This program must wait for something from the cache ? Let's run another in the meantime.
----
Alternate explanation :
Multi tasking/ Multi Multithreading is when several program share the same CPU by quickly alternating between them.
Simultaneous Multithreading is when 2 program run at the same time so less parts of the CPU are just sitting unused.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Running a Xeon dual-core is like mounting a Chevy big-block engine under a VW carburetor. The memory access just isn't there. Most of my stuff (modeling the solar corona) is RAM-bound anyway, so there's no win to be had at all by running the dual Intel cores. The Opterons have better RAM latency, which is a win -- but, more importantly, the two cores communicate cache-to-cache at the CPU clock speed, so dual-threaded processes run amazingly fast. If they're sharing memory, you effectively double the L2 cache size of both cores, which is a big win all around.
So, er, Xeon is teh 5uk and Opteron Pwns.
What's wrong with Tyan's Opteron offerings? I've built two systems now with Tyan S2882 boards and found them extremely powerful. The board includes dual gigabit ethernet ports and 1 10/100 port. It does not have PCI-E but it's got plenty of PCI-X slots. If you absolutely need PCI-E, look at the S2892 boards which still have AMD chipsets but also support a NVIDIA controller in order to provide PCI-E. I've had no trouble with the boards under RHEL3 or RHEL4. So what's missing from these boards that the Intel boards have? Jay
Does anyone realize that when fossil fuels are burnt to supply electricity it is usually coal and not oil/natural gas?
Next point, instead of no one being able to use electricity why don't we tell a few hippies to shut up and build a nuke or build a hydroelectric dam.
Everyone switching to a Pentium M won't do shit to oil consumption. The solution is to tell the hippies to shut up and start building some nukes.
We don't need to find alternative energy sources, we just need to get rid of the red tape and let the power infrastructure be built. When gas prices go high enough the market will signal that the time is right for the change.
The irony of global warming is that a few degrees increase in heat would probably dramatically lower the oil consumption in the US. Plus, I live in Canada, to tell you the truth I'd be pretty happy if it was 10 degrees warmer in the winter. The only countries that really need to worry are countries that are starving to death anyways. For Europe and North America warming will be a big boon.
I came to the same point a few years ago, then I bought a Mac. Fortunately for you, this was just announced today. They'll even assemble it for you.
Intel is trying to save their exclusive customers, like Dell. Dell and the others needs something to compete with AMD or else they are going to have to start using AMD. Intel does not want that. They don't want to lose their exclusive deals, so they give them just enough to please them.
They don't have to win the speed race. They don't have to make it better than AMD in any way. They just need something to fill the "dual core server processor" space in Dell's lineup. They delivered it. Job done.
This would also explain why they didn't make a big deal about the release. The customers that count would get the word directly, not through a press release. So why spend the money? (Of course having a piss poor performance does not help either.)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers