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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."
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.
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.
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.
OK, I'm intrigued. What kind of fudge do the current efficiency tests consist of? Measuring generated heat with a thermometer?
They used to but now they time how long it takes to toast a marshmallow. Its useful because you can use the melted mallows as thermal paste. Its not as efficient as Arctic Silver 5 but I hear its better than the standard ceramic stuff.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Let's not forget the environmental factor of using less electricity. More electricity means more carbon, and even if it doesn't matter to your company, it matters to other companies that your company will deal with.
Except that there is a very small performance difference in the 32bit world and a non-existent performance difference in the 64bit world. The Opteron actually outperforms quite commonly in the 64bit world much like the Athlons do against Core 2 Duo on the desktop side. Intel has an edge on 32bit optimization right now which is why the Core 2 Duo looks so good right now.
Add 4 and 8 sockets and you've got to be joking considering Intel's shared bus. They cores are chocked for memory throughput at that point while the Opterons just perform better and better as they scale. In a 2 socket system they compete very well. In a 4 socket system the Opteron is by far the superior choice both with power consumption and performance especially with 64bit database,email, and web servers.
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.
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.
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.
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All of my Opteron based servers are rock solid with multiple chipset vendors. The days when that was a problem for AMD are long gone. There is a reason I have to reboot my Xeon servers once a week and my Opteron servers stay up until my maintenance window. They are both configured identically but the Xeons just aren't as stable. I haven't been able to play with the newer Xeons, only the crappy P4 based ones. I've got some new servers coming though so I'll get an update on the stability issue.
Through the history of the Opteron though stability has never been an issue in my experience. The Athlon had problems as you were describing. There were plenty of Intel and AMD desktop chipsets that were horrible during that time. More of a chipset maker problem than a CPU maker. In both cases Intel and AMD had their own chipset out which did work. Although Intel motherboards declined sharply in quality around that time too. I remember having a bunch of xeons that would reboot and if you were lucky everything would come up okay. Firmware updates came out which gradually improved the issue. I do believe it took three firmware updates to get stability to what you would expect for a 24/7 server. Wasn't a problem with the CPU though.
Are you going to paste this comment onto every post from one of these individuals? Despite the fact that you keep getting modded down for it? You must be really obsessed or really, really dense. Give it a rest already - or at least say something new.
I have mod points and could just smack you into oblivion, but decided to post instead and let others do the smacking.
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.
"AMD's culture of minimal R&D/innovation."
What? Who brought 64-bit instructions to x86, when Intel and HP were trying to drive everyone to high-dollar (and at the time miserably performing) Itanium for 64-bit? Who brought out an architecture that would let you plug FPGAs, etc., into CPU slots?
IMHO, AMD is lagging in semiconductor manufacturing processes. Their geometries are larger, etc. I doubt that they get the yields that Intel does, and that counts against them in price wars. But developing new fab processes costs a lot of money, and Intel has always had a huge financial edge. There's no conceivable way that AMD isn't doing there best with the resources they have available on this front, as it has a direct impact on the bottom line. Hence their history of fabrication R&D agreements with IBM.
BTW, I've worked for both companies (but some years ago) and did process engineering work for Intel. I have at least some clue, which is more than the A/C parent poster has.
"AMD's culture of minimal R&D/innovation" is completely unjustified bullshit.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
The latest Xeons are all Core 2 derived parts. Your comparison is horribly dated.