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AMD's Six-Core Istanbul Opterons
EconolineCrush writes "AMD's latest 'Istanbul' Opterons add two cores per socket, for a grand total of six. Despite the extra cores, these new chips reside within the same power envelope as existing quad-core Opterons, and they're drop-in compatible with current systems. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the new chips, comparing their performance and power efficiency with that of Intel's Nehalem-based Xeons. Istanbul fares surprisingly well, particularly when one considers its performance-power ratio with highly parallelized workloads."
http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571
Includes information about virtualization performance: http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571&p=9
Conclusion:
"The six-core Opteron is not an alternative to the mighty Xeons in every application. The Xeons are more versatile thanks to the higher clockspeeds, higher IPC, Hyperthreading and higher bandwidth to memory. The Xeon 55xx series is clearly the better choice in OLTP, ERP, webserving, rendering and there is little doubt that it will continue to reign in the bandwidth intensive HPC workloads. There are two types of applications where we feel that the AMD six-core deserves your attention: decision support databases and virtualization."
the real news here is not the extra couple cores, but coherency snooping. this feature will make 4/8s machines far more attractive; it doesn't hurt that with 48 cores and 32 ddr3/1333 dimms, you have quite a monster. _and_ incidentally something that Intel can't currently answer.
there's no question that nehalem has put a serious dent in the market, but Intel's going quite slow in rolling out higher-end products. yes, a nehalem socket delivers about 50% more bandwidth than a current opteron socket, but show me the 8s nehalem machines. nehalem-ex is coming, but how soon and at what price?
one thing I haven't seen is any attempt to measure real SMP performance on new-gen chips. I don't mean something like Stream or VMs, where there is no real sharing inherent to the workload. how long does it take to exchange a _contended_ lock between cores (in the same socket vs remote)?
finally, the real question is whether there is actual demand for more-core chips. I'm in HPC, and we always want more, and throw good money. but it has to be smart more - the 6-core core2, for instance, was just asinine because even 2c core2 is drastically memory-bandwidth-starved. nehalem-ex seems quite promising, but if it's cheaper to cluster dual-socket machines rather than pay the premium for 4s's, the 4s market will be stunted and less successful in a self-fulfilling way...
You've already made this comment before, and I've already responded, so I'll keep it short and sweet.
If you're using a slow 2.2 GHz Quad core, that's not the fault of the industry, that's the fault of YOU. I have already made it clear that the top-end Core 2 Duo chips would run circles around your P4, but apparently you'd prefer to pretend they don't exist. As for your dog-slow quad core, that was YOUR purchasing decision. You can purchase MUCH FASTER quad cores today for reasonable prices, but apparently you're still suck in the year 2006.
The reason Core 2 / Quad destroys the P4 despite having a slower clock speed: Core 2 ups the Instructions Per Clock versus the Pentium 4. The increase is between %60 and %100 more IPC. If you read my previous response to you on the subject, you'd actually know that, instead of continuing to spout your ignorant bullshit.
And if you can't find a video codec with multiple core support, you're looking in the wrong place. Video decode is one of those embarrassingly-easy things to parallelize, and so your "boast" is really just outing you as a lazy bastard who can't take five seconds to search Google.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.