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AMD Beats Intel in Power-Efficiency Study

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the bang-for-the-buck dept.

Ted Samson writes "AMD Opteron servers proved up to 15.2 percent more energy-efficient than those running Intel Xeon in a server-power-efficiency test performed by Neal Nelson and Associates, InfoWorld reports. That translates to annual electricity savings between $20.29 per server and $36.04 per server, depending on the workload, the study concluded. The benchmark tests were conducted on similarly configured 3GHz systems running Novell SUSE Linux, Apache2, and MySQL."

5 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple OS-es by OS24Ever · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would have liked to seen them test it with the 'big three' OSes of Linux (RH and SUSE), VMware and WIndows. It would have been nice to see if the power management of the operating systems would have come into play some above and beyond just the single OS. Besides the OS the applications used run on any of those platforms.

    --

    As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.

  2. Power savings of OSS. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Open source software tends to bring reduce power consumption, as well. After switching a number of our systems from Windows Server 2003 to Linux, we saw a fairly significant drop in our electricity costs.

    Our analysis suggests that this was due to the open source software being more efficient than the equivalent Windows-based software. This is backed up by the fact that we saw a significant performance boost after the transition. Database jobs that would take 20 minutes on SQL Server 2005 and Windows 2003 would be done in under 5 minutes when using PostgreSQL on Linux. Those 15 minutes of not processing resulted in far less usage of the CPU, and far less disk activity, thus saving power.

  3. GHz != Performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A 3.0GHz Core 2 is more than 15% faster than a 3GHz Opteron for many tasks.

    AMD is doing better at idle speeds (Intel definitely needs to crank Penryn down more when it's not in user) but if this survey compared equivalent performance processors, the difference would be much smaller.

  4. Re:Different Power Supplies by florescent_beige · · Score: 3, Interesting

    600 is a 20% increase from 500, and 500 is a 17% decrease from 600. It's equally correct to say difference between 500 and 600 is 17% and 20%.

    --
    Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
  5. Saveing are also higher by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If add that ram for AMD severs costs less then FB-DIMMS.

    Also FB-DIMMS and the intel chipset need a lot more power then amd chipsets and DDR2 ECC / DDR1 ECC ram.