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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."
Bulldozers do not make good servers. Use a computer. Problem solved.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
And yet, 3 supercomputers with those opterons were ordered in the last 4 weeks ? and in a month, one of them - which is being revamped from #3 supercomputer position of the world - will be #1 supercomputer of the world when complete ? Was lockheed martin also morons to choose an opteron based supercomputer ?
Why is an article which is apparently written to bash amd was included in slashdot despite its apparent bias ?
Read radical news here
The standard of writing at "Ars Technica" have declined far more than AMD's relative performance to Intel.
Recall the Itanium from Intel and HP.. It started out with great hype more than ten years ago. When the first benchmarks came no-one wanted to believe them. Still that particular architecture is about to die.
Unfortunately, Bulldozer may end up with a similar fate. The big difference is that Intel had its regular desktop cpu line-up to finance the Itanium disaster. If nothing can be much improved on the AMD cpu side, can the shrinking graphics card business save AMD?
I hope so.
I really don't get the conclusion.
The bulldozer is faster then the Xeon chip on all cpu benchmarks which can generate enough threads to fill all cores.
Each bulldozer core is as fast as a core on a Opteron 6100.
It looks exactly like the cpu I want in my web/db server, and my supercomputer.
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.
When someone says that a CPU was designed around multiple threads I think virtualization. yeah you can argue that servers are multithreaded in that they have to handle multiple users connecting, but that's bull. I can write a badly threaded application that doesn't effectively use the multiple cores...
So how do these cpus perform with something like ESX running on them?
Scott
That's perfect for running BOINC though, which is very good at using multiple cores at their full capacity. Useless for the business, but great for contributing to science projects :-)
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.
TPC-C is performed on Windows 2008 see http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=111111501
Anantech tested on Windows 7.
It is known that Windows 7 and 2008 are not optimized for Bulldozer, especially at the task scheduling level.
So we do not know the real power of the Bulldozer architecture in the Windows world yet
See http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/32394-bulldozer-benchmarks-correct-definitive which unfortunately only has very few benchmarks.
You can also look at the phoronix site, where Bulldozer is tested on Linux.
Sadly AMD simply has not performed over the last year or two, with no real answers to Intel's I series.
While i totally agree on your first statement, i don't on the second. Last two years you say?.. My desktop is 1 year old, running a quad-core phenom@3.4GHz. Not only was it the best-value-for-money, costing me only 169 euro for the processor, it is also one of the fastest around - up to this very day, even for single-thread tasks.
Here's a hint. Artificial benchmarks don't say a thing. There's one thing where AMD is very, very good and outperforms intel in any way, and that's memory management. I couldn't care less for floating point performance, or any other dry/wetstone-like test. What does count though, is how well a processor does in doing several tasks at a time. Running 2 games, at the same time (or 6 if i wish). And the OS-i-be-ashamed-to-say-the-name-off. And a numbercruncher. And a webbrowser with a dozen tabs. While chatting on skype. And drawing a 30-layered image with the gimp.
And this box - doesnt' give a kick. It just does it - and each task runs just as well as were it running alone. Now tell me again, how was AMD not good on the desktop last 2 years?
Or simply, way too low yield...
Anandtech.com provides much more knowledgeable and professional reviews. They had this to about AMD's new chip, "Unfortunately, with the current power management in ESXi, we are not satisfied with the Performance/watt ratio of the Opteron 6276. The Xeon needs up to 25% less energy and performs slightly better. So if performance/watt is your first priority, we think the current Xeons are your best option. The Opteron 6276 offers a better performance per dollar ratio. It delivers the performance of $1000 Xeon (X5650) at $800. Add to this that the G34 based servers are typically less expensive than their Intel LGA 1366 counterparts and the price bonus for the new Opteron grows. If performance/dollar is your first priority, we think the Opteron 6276 is an attractive alternative." http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200/14
Sadly AMD simply has not performed over the last year or two,
That's just Simply not true. On the server side, the quad 6100 1U servers are very competitive, supplying as much (sometimes more) power than iuntel boxes for considerably less money. At this point they're a bit of a no-brainer in the server room.
On the desktop, it is different. More of the benchmarks show that the core i5 is faster than the Phenom2 x6 and 8150. But some benchmarks show that the AMD showings can be considerably faster. The choice is really simple. If your workload is dominated by the kind of things that Intel do well, then buy intel, otherwise buy AMD.
The CPUs are simply too close otherwise.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Though I'm suspicious that Bulldozer is going down remarkably like NetBurst (NetBurst made design compromises for marketable massive clock gains, Bulldozer similarly makes compromises to boost the now-marketable core count) and time may prove that wrong, but this article was crap.
It looked like they cherry picked some benchmarks from the world at large with no control. As pointed out in the article, the tpmC benchmark had massive storage differences and the cost delta means there were probably node count differences. There are so many things in play that it is impossible to derive any sort of statement specifically about the processors. The article, however uses that as a point to show AMD is more expensive to make AMD look bad but in the same breath says better SSDs probably drove the benefit to steal AMD's thunder. He can't have it both ways. I'm inclined to believe the storage architecture was the key in terms of cost and performance given the nature of the test.
Later, the article says AMD should have just done 16-core Magny-Cours. Clearly AMD should hire him as he is a genius who *must* have considered all the complexities and figured out a way to achieve that core density when no one else in the industry has. No one pretends for a second that a bulldozer module matches 2 'real' cores, but they can't just wave their wand and make a 16-core package of the old architecture. Bulldozer is all about trying to ascertain the 'important' bits of a core and share other bits in the hopes the added resource gives most of the benefit of an additional core without the downsides that make it impossible to do that many cores on a socket.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Tech Report demonstrated this to be the case by setting the thread affinity on their tests, so they were locked to specific cores, using only once core per module. They saw as much as a 30% improvement in the single threaded or lightly threaded benchmarks. Other sources, including AMD itself, have demonstrated as much as 10% improvement in performance by using a better thread scheduler. AMD has whitepapers discussing this issue.
As for changing the OS kernels... Windows 8 already has the changes. Windows 7 and Server 2008 may get them in a future update (Service Pack?). Linux kernel support is ready and is available in a kernel patch. Compiler support is now included in VS 2010. So, not necessarily a flop; but, might be a short while before the full capability of the architecture is realized.
We need healthy competition to Intel, to keep pushing tech forward and prices down. Sadly AMD simply has not performed over the last year or two, with no real answers to Intel's I series.
I built a Linux server/desktop earlier this year:
AM3+ motherboard (4 RAM slots, 6 x SATA 6GB ports, 2 x USB 3.0 ports): 90$
AMD 1090T six core CPU: 160$
Great performance, incredible value. Once Bulldozer gets better, I can seamlessly upgrade it. Now, I'd like to see an Intel equivalent for this.
Too many? I don't think so. And please stop trying to convince the AMD fanboys that AMD is producing crap.
Why?
1) We need AMD alive and kicking to at least give Intel some competition (look at what has happened now that AMD is weak - Intel started having "unlock codes" to unlock more performance/features for their processors ).
2) So someone needs to buy the current batch of AMD crap[1] to keep AMD alive till they come up with something better.
3) I'd rather not buy AMD's current crap. It is inferior for most popular desktop and server tasks.
4) Therefore we need as many AMD fanboys as possible to continue thinking that AMD is great and buying lots of AMD crap.
[1] Yes I know AMD produced better stuff than Intel some years ago. However the latest CPUs ironically appear to be AMD's Prescott Edition CPUs.
Don't forget, Intel's very successful Core 2 Duo came from a previous design (Pentium M) that had been reserved to laptops
That was a bit of a special case. It's not a testament of how fundamentally awesome low power processors are, and more of a illustration of *just* how bad NetBurst was. The Pentium M skipped NetBurst entirely because they *couldn't* make it work acceptably in a mobile device.
*Usually* the low power parts optimize for overall wattage and *not* performance per watt. If they can get 25% more performance but at 10% more power, a desktop context may elect to do it and a mobile may elect not to.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
wrong. the 386-sx had a 16 bit memory bus (vs 32 bit on the DX). It had no FPU, that was a separate socket.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.