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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."
Now if they can get their laptop chips to be more efficient than Intel's, I'll be happy again.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
AMD also typically has lower idle clock multipliers so when they're not doing anything, they draw less power. If you have a room full of computers sitting there doing nothing, you'll certainly use less power in that case.
Tor like oatmeals!
So who cares about those ancient CPUs.
sure, I'm glad there's an AMD to compete with Intel...helps spur development and, most importantly, helps drive prices down.
But time and time again, the AMD chips and BIOSes for AMD chipsets have many, many more flaws than comparable Intel systems. That's just a fact. So, yes, maybe right here and now AMD saves a few percent more power under certain extenuating circumstances, but in the end, who cares? Intel is still where it's at, for my processing dollar. Nobody ever got fired for buying MS? You can say that doubly so for buying Intel.
The FB-DIMMS are sucking up alot of power and giving off a lot of heat. That is bad for intel as there chipsets use alot more power as well and that looks bad next to a AMD system with cheaper DDR2 ECC ram.
Intel new 4p systems with 4 FSB, L3 cache in the chipset and FB-DIMM may even use a lot more.
Amd systems can have more then one chip set link and more pci-e lanes as well.
As the size of the farm scales, however, I'd hazard to guess that the power consumption differences would be far more noticable.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
May the Maths Be with you!
If intel chips are constantly exposed as being inferior to AMD's, why can't intel improve its engineering, with all that money flowing to them?
What do AMD have in their design methodologies that Intel don't?
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.
I am sure AMD Hypertrasport is the king who rules! Unless Intel will come with something similar...
MySQL Error 1040: Can't return sig, Too many connections!
Whether you Very distracting to Share. MFrreBSD is Jesus Up The systems. The Gay ink splashes across big picture. What gloves, condoms have left in
At last we'll be able to determine server power efficiency.
London, the world financial centre has real problems with datacentre power supplies. Any new ones pretty much have to be built outside the M25. There's pressure on the ones inside to use less power.
Deleted
Looks like IDG (ComputerWorld, ITWorld, NetworkWorld...) is really hitting Slashdot HARD, either that or they have a deal with Slashdot. Here's a partial list of the shills that regularly show up and have almost 100% article acceptance rates: Ian Lamont
Lucas123
coondoggie
inkslinger77
narramissic
jcatcw
Looks like they spread out the work over a few shill user accounts, which is to be expected. If it's all OK and everything with the corporate ownership of Slashdot to be played by IDG, I suppose that's their business, but one would hope that they are actually getting PAID for being part of IDG's advertising program. And of course there should be disclosure so that visitors to Slashdot realize they are reading advertisements and not an article submitted by a "real" user...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_QuickPath_Inter connect , formerly known as CSI (common system interface).
I think the parent has a good point: Why is IDG getting so much "facetime" at Slashdot? It certainly can't be because the content is the best out there; of every single topic posted by the IDG trolls, there are much better sources. I mean, come on! What's with this? We don't deserve to know when there is bias in the Front Page selections?
Only the first of these definitions points to a meaning where a `fact' is unequivocally and always true.
Does anyone else see any bias with a website, called "worlds-fastest", seemingly dedicated to pro AMD benchmarks, that he has done out of the goodness of his heart? And all the custom software he has written, doesn't have any CPU specific optimizations? None of the open source software, has any optimizations slanted toward one side or another? Coming out with an AMD Opteron vs Intel Netburst test result, when the newer Intel stuff had been out for 6 months? It all looks like a bunch of PR to generate business for Neal and AMD. Plus some ego stuff going on, everytime someone feels Intel isn't giving them the time of day, they go all out into a pissing contest. (IE, on his website since "Intel claimed they had no Core systems to loan him" he goes off to benchmark 4 year old Xeon and AMD machines. Remind me to pay a non-biased company for benchmarks, thank you.
--ngoy
Opteron at least on floating point is lower than Woodcrest/Clovertown IPC in 64-bit. Note the top500 and the increase of Intel presence as of the Core2 generation. Barcelona is supposed to either meet or beat the Intel floating point IPC, but that's yet to be proven publicly. There is at least one significant 64-bit operation that Core2 creams AMD with. I don't know much about other types of instructions in general though.
I agree though, AMD's architecture scales *much* better with socket count and memory architecture wise blows Intel away.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Excuse me, NetBurst? You are testing against NetBurst? That's like comparing Core2Duo against Duron, imho. Nice try, astroturfers.
DEC was bought by Compaq way back when (1997?). Compaq was bought by HP more recently. AMD was not involved with either of those takeovers.
So how did AMD get the DEC Alpha engineers? As far as I know, the DEC Alpha guys are still within HP. Did I miss something?
To be more specific, the Xeon processor in this review is the same processor core as the Merom/Conroe Core 2 Duo core. If you benchmark Conroe on a platform using the same memory technology (DDR2) as AMD, you'll find that Intel's power consumption is significantly less than AMD's. But Intel decided to use a different technology (FBDIMM) for its server platforms, in order to increase maximum memory capacity, whereas the Opteron used a simpler technology which is severely limited in memory capacity per channel, since the outdated parallel multidrop DDR2 bus can't go at speed when heavily loaded.
FBDIMM is like PCI-Express or Hypertransport for a memory interface, meaning that it's serial and point to point, instead of parallel and multidrop. This allows Intel to add many more loads to the memory channel without slowing the channel down, because it is Fully Buffered (the FB part of FBDIMM), which increases memory capacity per channel. However, FBDIMM also turns out to be very power hungry, and Intel is now being forced (by benchmarks such as this one) to release server platforms without FBDIMM in order to lower power consumption for people who don't need large memory capacities. (for some confirmation of this, look here: http://theinquirer.net/?article=42183)
In any case, the results of this benchmark aren't about "chips", they're about platforms. Intel's current chips are pretty good, but their server platforms need some work. That's why Intel's coming out with a whole new platform next year (here's some reading material for you: http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082 807020032 ).
So a quick answer to your question: Intel's chips ARE better than AMD's, but their platforms aren't. Here's the question you should have asked: Why are Intel's platforms always behind AMDs? The answer to that is basically that Intel has lots more internal politics, and therefore it is slow to change things that have impact across the company, like platforms. Intel has a lot of internal competition: lots of separate groups working on various competing processors, so the processors themselves are usually pretty good (Darwin at work). But the teams making the processors don't have the freedom to change the platform, since that's outside their scope and requires lots of corporate maneuvering. So Intel's platforms are much slower to change than AMDs.
Summing up: don't confuse a system benchmark for a processor benchmark! TFA isn't about processors at all, it's about systems.
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No relation, but Neal is a sharp cookie nonetheless. I've worked with him before.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Intel BIOSes have been getting worse than AMD's as far as diagnosing problems goes in HP laptops. AMD-based HP laptops will give you a post beep code if something is wrong, Intel-based ones do not. This applies to both Commercial and Consumer-version laptops. I know, I spent six months repairing them.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Imagine a Lone Beowulf cluster of these!
I would like to discuss how the benchmark could be improved. In its current form: 1) It is a client/server test with web clients talking to an Apache2 web server, 2) The server runs SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, 3) The server's database tables are built on MySQL, 4) The transaction is a gasoline credit card purchase, 5) The test measures power consumed at 7 different transaction activity levels: Idle, 5 different constant transaction rates and the maximum that the server will deliver, 6) At each activity level the benchmark collects power used for 30 minutes, 7) The test reports its data for all levels tested, 8) The transactions are coded so that as the level of user activity increases larger and larger areas of the database tables are accessed. This means that at lower user counts the disk I/O is cached and the test is calculation intensive while at higher user counts the database working set may exceed the kernel disk cache size and thus the test is limited by physical disk I/O.
Many real world servers process web transactions against RDMSs and are idle evenings and weekends. This test lets people: 1) compare the maximum throughput of different machines, 2) Review the power consumed at maximum throughput, 3) Review the power used at various intermediate transaction arrival rates, and 4) Review the power consumed at idle.
Would this be a better benchmark with Oracle rather than MySQL or RedHat rather than SuSE? Would it be a better test without the client/server network traffic? Would it be better if is was based on floating point calculations that did not do any database access or disk I/O? What can be done to make this a more useful benchmark? Neal Nelson
The forthcoming energy efficiency benchmark from SPEC is generally described at http://www.spec.org/specpower/
I also highly recommend taking a trip down to your local library and asking to see the Oxford English Dictionary. If you do, you can see the etymology of various senses of the word. You'll discover that the sense of the word ``Something that is alleged to be, or conceivably might be, a 'fact''' goes back at least to the early eighteenth century.