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In Tests Opteron Shows Efficiency Edge Over Intel, Again
Ted Samson writes "In their latest round of energy-efficiency tests between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, independent testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates find AMD still holds an edge, but it's certainly not cut-and-dried. Nelson put similarly equipped servers through another gauntlet of tests, swapping in different amounts of memory and varying transaction loads. In the end, he found that the more memory he installed on the servers, the better the Opteron performed compared to the Xeon. Additionally, at maximum throughput, the Intel system fared better, power-efficiency-wise, by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent. And in idle states — that is, when servers were waiting for their next work load — AMD consistently creamed Intel."
Idle power consumption may not be important for systems that are under a constant workload all the time, but for office file servers, where any given server may be under heavy load for 8 hours a day (probably closer to 6 and probably not "heavy load at that), having it draw less power in the remaining 16 hours would be rather beneficial, after all a server like that would be idle 2/3 of the time.
Obviously ideally you would be using all your kit at 95% capacity all the time, but even then you would need some idle kit stood by to take case of any additional demand. Sadly company' who aren't planning their IT systems with load in mind (but rather by which vendor takes them to lunch more often or which has the coolest flashing lights) are probably not too interested in power consumption stats anyway
Most servers spend a lot of time idle, often far more time idle than busy...
You don't buy a server that is just barely fast enough for your workload, your over-spec so that it can easily handle spikes in load and allow for future growth.
Also, many business operations have busy hours and quiet hours, for instance internal servers at a company will usually only see much load during working hours.
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Actually, if you look at the raw test data (rather than the conclusions) you will see that both servers performed nearly equally. The xeon doing slightly better on some tests, while the opteron better in others. In most tests the results are about the same (5% difference)