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Xeons, Opterons Compared in Power Efficiency
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. "
AMD needs to deliver some real quad core chips (or 8 core chips) that will beat Intel's performance. If they don't soon, AMD will quickly get kicked back to the 2nd rate Intel cloner that everyone knew them prior to their groundbreaking AMD 64s and dual core chips briefly took the performance lead from Intel. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that AMD will deliver, I've always liked (and bought) their chips as long as the performance is similar to Intel.
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AMD needs to do what they have been doing - thinking independently and coming up with original solutions.
the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons
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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?
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RISC worked well when speed of memory and CPU's were at parity. The simplified instructions let the CPU be clocked a lot faster, not to mention their shallow pipelines made it less costly when branch prediction failed. The tradeoff was that it usually took more instructions to accomplish a given task.
But as CPU's have spent more and more time waiting for memory, CISC has really come into its own. Think of CISC as a compression algrorithm: An x86 instruction which fits in 16-32 bits might take 4 or 5 instructions on a RISC processor, weighing in at 96-128 bits. It's no surprise why CISC processors have destroyed RISC in the past decade.
one friend who works for oracle, in their datacenter, told me that they are swaping the dell intel xeon server with Sun AMD Opteron servers. the main reason behind this server swap is power efficiency of the new sun servers. So that means big corps already had their eye on AMD cpus :)
It has always been my understanding that best practices dictate a server running at a constant 100% CPU utilization is underpowered and needs upgraded. Normal, every day, steady CPU utilization should hover no higher than around 50% (closer to 75%, if you like living on the edge) leaving enough CPU to handle peak loads. Very few functions require a system that maintains a constant CPU utilization and never peaks over it.
I know of and have worked with too many organizations that figure it's just a matter of slapping all the computers in an air-conditioned room. Every watt of waste heat adds to the A/C bill.
Old fashioned water-cooled mainframes and big iron (for it's time) often recirculated the wasted heat into the heating systems of the surrounding buildings. We've known all along how to be more energy efficient, if companies and management would only place the emphasis on the environment in their budgets.
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See http://electricrain.com/greg/opteron-powersave.txt .
All AMD K8 (Opteron and Athlon 64) CPUs have the ability to run the clock and an extra slow speed when in HLT (idle) mode saving a bunch more power. Many (most?) BIOSes are not smart enough to enable this. A simple setpci command will turn it on under linux.
find out if its on:
setpci -d 1022:1103 87.b
If that returns 00, its off. To turn on clock-divide-in-hlt to div by 512 mode use:
setpci -d 1022:1103 87.b=61
(see the above URL for links to the AMD documentation on the PMM7 register; other values can work).