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45nm Opteron Performance, Power Efficiency Tested

Posted by kdawson on from the brass-tacks dept.

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."

5 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. AMD had it going by bb84 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...but have since really lost momentum and competitiveness. They truly awakened the sleeping giant when they were kicking Intel's ass a few years ago.

    1. Re:AMD had it going by speed+of+lightx2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...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.

    2. Re:AMD had it going by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What scares me is that AMD might decline into a purely budget CPU house like Cyrix did and then leave the market together.

      Now think back to the Itanium fiasco. If AMD hadn't have been around or hadn't been making high end chips Intel could have made the high end IA64 and gradually migrate the whole market to it. So now we'd be running underpowered and overpriced IA64 chips. In a sense the thing that prevented that was that chips were dual sourced so Intel couldn't force a transition to an inferior successor like Microsoft did with XP to Vista. And IA64 was likely so patented that no one else would be ever be able to make compatible chips.

      Of course with AMD around Intel was forced to adopt x64 and produce the excellent Core, Core2 and now Core i7 microarchitectures and do it very quickly. Just imagine what would have happened if they hadn't been. Recently I've heard AMD they will go fabless for example. TSMC and other commodity fabs don't have technology to match Intel, so AMD will lag behind. For low end stuff it doesn't matter much, but it really does for the high end. Mind you Intel is kicking ass in the netbook market too. It really makes you wonder how long AMD will be around. And if AMD go under so would ATI since they bought it. I actually prefer Intel and NVidia in this generation but I'm not sure they would be much good if there was no competition.

      Not a very comforting thought is it?

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. Re:Does 'Opteron' mean 'expensive'? by thona · · Score: 5, Informative

    No marketing talk in those names.

    Not sure you would call it expensive, but the OPTERON chips per definition are only server chips. The Opteron 23xx series (45nm shanghai) is dual processor, while the 83xx series is quad processor.

    The end user equivalent is the PHENOM series.

    Note that this is a technical difference, not marketing talk. The Opterons use Socket F, while the Phenoms (single processor only) use the AM2+ socket. Different pin count, different number of interconnect ports (for connecting to other processory).

    45nm Phenoms are IIRC supposed to appear soonish ;) Opterons start being available now - I pick up a new server on friday.

  3. Re:Site's been slashdotted by this+great+guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.