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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."
Opteron?
Xeon?
Why do these top of the line processors sound like character names from crummy 1980-vintage cartoons about giant robots who talk like street thugs?
"I'm calling you out Xeon! You will be defeated and all Processaria will bow before my superior power stats!"
"You're a fool if you believe those benchmarks Opteron! The true power is Inside!" (duh-Dah-dumm!)
This just in! AMD is more efficient than Intel when doing nothing!
For a really good test, they should compare AMD to an empty carboard box, and see which one uses more power when processing no transactions.
Here is the whitepaper, instead of the summaries.
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)