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45nm Opteron Performance, Power Efficiency Tested
An anonymous reader writes "Now that Intel has unleashed its next-generation Core i7 processors, all eyes are turned to AMD and its incoming wave of 45nm CPUs. To get a feel for AMD's future competitiveness, The Tech Report has taken a pair of 2.7GHz 45nm Opterons (with 75W power envelopes) and put them through the paces against Intel Xeons and older, 65nm Opterons in an extensive suite of performance and power efficiency tests — from Cinema 4D and SPECjbb to computational fluid dynamics and a custom XML handling benchmark. The verdict: AMD's new 45nm quad-core design is a notable improvement over the 65nm iteration, and it proves to be a remarkably power-efficient competitor to Intel's Xeons. However, 45nm AMD chips likely don't have what it takes to best Intel's Core i7 and future Nehalem-based Xeons."
...but have since really lost momentum and competitiveness
Seven out of the top ten supercomputers in the latest top500 list have AMD in them, including the top two, so I don't really see the whole "AMD losing momentum and competitiveness.
You are so true about virtualization. Just 2 or 3 weeks ago I was benchmarking Linux and Windows VMs compiling Java code under Qemu/KVM-75 on an 2-socket 8-core 2.0GHz Opteron 2350 (non-Shanghai) system, and on a 1-socket 4-core 2.4GHz Core 2 Q6600 system. The VMs were configured with 1, 2, or 4 virtual processors and not more, to not give an unfair advantage to the AMD system which had twice the number of cores. Despite the lower CPU frequency as well as lower memory throughput and latency (registered DDR2-667 vs. unbuffered DDR2-800 for Intel), the AMD system was kicking the ass of the Intel system in every case by as much as 10-30%. Most likely this was because of the integrated memory controller and support of nested paging (aka "Rapid Virtualization Index"). Now Intel has cloned these 2 features in their Nehalem microarchitecture. I am very impatient to see how they perform.