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Xeons, Opterons Compared in Power Efficiency

Posted by Zonk on from the nothing-like-some-friday-morning-power-analysis dept.

Bender writes "The Tech Report has put Intel's 'Woodcrest' and quad-core 'Clovertown' Xeons up against AMD's Socket F Opterons in a range of applications, including widely multithreaded tests from academic fields like computational fluid dynamics and proteomics. They've also attempted to quantify power efficiency in terms of energy use over over time and energy use per task, with some surprising results." From the article: "On the power efficiency front, we found both Xeons and Opterons to be very good in specific ways. The Opteron 2218 is excellent overall in power efficiency, and I can see why AMD issued its challenge. Yes, we were testing the top speed grade of the Xeon 5100 and 5300 series against the Opteron 2218, but the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons ... We've learned that multithreaded execution is another recipe for power-efficient performance, and on that front, the Xeons excel. The eight-core Xeon 5355 system managed to render our multithreaded POV-Ray test scene using the least total energy, even though its peak power consumption was rather high, because it finished the job in about half the time that the four-way systems did. Similarly, the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly. "

1 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm, so which better reflects real-world usage? by pla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons
    ...
    the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly.

    So what does this mean for people shopping for servers?

    If your servers constantly tick along at nearly 100% CPU use, you might do better going with the Xeon system. If your machines basically sit idle most of the time with an occasional spike for a few seconds when it actually does something, the AMD would save you more on electricity.

    Of course, this raises a third possibility - Would running a number of virtual servers on one large Xeon machine waste more energy than it saves, or give a net gain?