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Bulldozer Server Benchmarks Not Promising
New submitter RobinEggs writes "Some reviews of Bulldozer's server performance have arrived. Ars Technica has the breakdown, and the results are pretty ugly. Apparently Bulldozer fares just as poorly with servers as with desktops. From the article: 'One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. ... It looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.' It's probably much too early to start editorializing about the end of AMD, or even to say with certainty that Bulldozer has failed, but my untrained eye can't yet see any possible silver lining in these new processors."
I thought we all switched to full-fat floating-point operations over 15 years ago when the Pentium hit the mainstream and everyone finally had an on-die FPU in their PC
Its application dependent. I doubt if much fp stuff gets done in cryptography, routing, and many simulations.
Windows does not (yet) know how to properly schedule threads on that hardware. This has caused issues with all the benchmarks, not unlike what happened when Intel Hyperthreading was first released. Once the proper support is added to the OS kernels, the results should be much better.
Supercomputers are NOT built based on processor speed.
Um.
That's rather an oversimplification, to the point of being wrong.
Supercomputers need good interconnects and lots of processing power. One or the other alone won't do.
Much of the $$$ goes into interconnects, but also the CPUs and the cooling, which is very dependent on the CPUS. All things considered, neither AMD nor Intel have the fast interconnects on-die (unlike Fijutsu), so pretty much the main thing to choose between the CPUs is, well, the CPUs.
And it seems like AMD are the best option at the moment for this kind of workload.
The rest of us will use Xeons and be very happy with the results.
No, you will. I'll stick with my Supermicro quad 6100s for as long as I can and be very happy with the immense price/performance they offered.
SJW n. One who posts facts.