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."

Comments

Re:Does 'Opteron' mean 'expensive'?

[Ed Avis]

A lot of desktops these days have dual core processors as standard, so I don't think you can say that this is a server feature by definition. If AMD doesn't have a reasonably priced desktop chip that competes on performance with Intel's Core Duo and Core i7 then they lose out on the large market segment in between low-end desktops and servers.

XML

[ezzzD55J]

Anyone else find it hilarious that XML processing is used in a performance benchmark nowadays?

I've always thought those things were bloated and slow, but I hadn't expected this :)