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Server Benchmarking Lone Wolf Bites Intel Again
Ian Lamont writes "Neal Nelson, the engineer who conducts independent server benchmarking, has nipped Intel again by reporting that AMD's Opteron chips 'delivered better power efficiency' than Xeon processors. Intel has discounted the findings, claiming that Nelson's methodology 'ignores performance,' but the company may not be able to ignore Nelson for much longer: the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit company that develops computing benchmarks, is expected to publish a new test suite for comparing server efficiency that Nelson believes will be similar to his own benchmarks that measure server power usage directly from the wall plug."
The other side of that is that lowering the power consumption means lowering the heat generated which means lowering the cooling requirements.
And cooling requires electricity also. So by reducing the power usage of one component, you can save money on your cooling costs, also. It's twice the savings.
The original Advanced-Memory-Buffer-based FBDIMMs might be going away next year but Intel has not given up on off-chip memory bridges since they announced plans for AMB2. Instead of having the AMB2 chip on-DIMM, it will be either on multi-DIMM AMB2 risers or on the motherboard.
BTW, AMD also announced plans for off-chip AMB2-like memory bridges with multiple multi-gigabit serial lanes... they called it G3MX: G3 (socket) Memory eXtender.
So, while FBDIMMs may be going away soon, the idea of using external bridges to dump the RAM further away from the CPUs/chipset using serial interfaces is gaining traction - at least in the server space.
It's fairly common for 3rd party data centers to charge based on power consumption. If you want to rent spaces to have a few machines hosted, you can save a bunch of money by building servers that aren't power hogs. Any data center worth hosting at pays very close attention to how much power they have available, so even in the event of power loss, then have an alternate circuit to draw from and/or sufficient emergency generator power.
It depends upon what's important to you. Is power consumption important? AMD wins. Is multiple CPU cores in single servers important? Anything over 4 until recently, and now 8, is an AMD win. Do you need the most processing power possible for a single process in a 2P or less unit? Intel wins that one. Need high density stacked CPUs with loads of RAM? AMD wins that one (That's a power/heat/space issue). Need to process web calls? Sun wins that one hands down on a /$, /kW, and /J measure.
There are definite differences in performance between the various CPUs. A mere 5% difference in power draw across a day times 1000s of CPUs is significant. Same with a 5% thermal dissipation difference, as that turns into increased cooling requirements.
These things all matter in the server world.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.