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."

Comments

Re:She Cannot Be Fooled

[bockelboy]

These tests *did* factor performance into this (well, that's what the tester says. Intel is contesting this claim. You decided who you believe). In fact, those tests draw the same conclusions as folks I know who recently bought Opteron servers.

The Intel chips have great performance per watt *as a chip*. Perhaps even better than AMD does; I've never measured a chip's power usage.

The Intel servers, on the other hand, have worse performance per watt *as a fully loaded server*. Unless you're running the chip without a server, you generally should care about the power draw from the outlet - like these tests did.

The Intel servers seem to have the edge in performance per watt when the server is going nearly unused. However, in my area, usually the CPU is pegged 24/7 (unlike, say, a webserver).

It's good to see the chip wars are still alive and kicking. When the competition is healthy, consumers benefit instead of stockholders.

Re:FBDIMM

[RingDev]

And the percent of Netadmins who have the time, budget, knowledge, and inclination to do so is right about .001%

I agree that Virtualization is a great solution, but the vast majority of IT shops around the world don't have the knowledge or budget to pull it off these days. Give it another 5-10 years and it'll be the new standard, but right now it just doesn't have the market or education penetration. For the cost of investing in a Xen system and training, most IT shops will be financially better off just paying the extra electric bill.

-Rick