Eight Core Servers: Opteron 880 (Egypt) vs. Xeon MP 3.0 GHz (Paxville)
by Jason Clark on April 24, 2006 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Dell DVD Store
The Dell DVD store test is a new addition to our test suite, and essentially replaced our old order-entry test.
Here the Opteron leads by 41%. This test is indicative of an enterprise level e-commerce application.
Conclusion
At present, Opteron has a commanding lead in 8-way configurations. Looking at the prices of the processors we used, AMD has the advantage there as well. The Xeon MP 3.0 GHz processors currently cost upwards of $3000 each, whereas Opteron 880 are about $1000 less. Of course, for enterprise servers price is less of a concern; performance, scalability, and reliability take precedence. Reliability might be a tie, but that's about as close as Intel's Xeon MP currently comes to Opteron.
Nothing that we've written in this article should be a surprise. All of our Opteron benchmarks have shown the scalability of the K8 architecture. The elusive question is, what next? AMD is completely quiet about anything other than a socket and memory controller change; is that enough to fend off Woodcrest? We speculate that the end of the year will be interesting to say the least. What we've seen of initial Bensley performance looks promising, and the Woodcrest addition later on should kick the competition up another notch. If everything goes as planned, Intel may just regain lost ground.
The Dell DVD store test is a new addition to our test suite, and essentially replaced our old order-entry test.
Here the Opteron leads by 41%. This test is indicative of an enterprise level e-commerce application.
Conclusion
At present, Opteron has a commanding lead in 8-way configurations. Looking at the prices of the processors we used, AMD has the advantage there as well. The Xeon MP 3.0 GHz processors currently cost upwards of $3000 each, whereas Opteron 880 are about $1000 less. Of course, for enterprise servers price is less of a concern; performance, scalability, and reliability take precedence. Reliability might be a tie, but that's about as close as Intel's Xeon MP currently comes to Opteron.
Nothing that we've written in this article should be a surprise. All of our Opteron benchmarks have shown the scalability of the K8 architecture. The elusive question is, what next? AMD is completely quiet about anything other than a socket and memory controller change; is that enough to fend off Woodcrest? We speculate that the end of the year will be interesting to say the least. What we've seen of initial Bensley performance looks promising, and the Woodcrest addition later on should kick the competition up another notch. If everything goes as planned, Intel may just regain lost ground.
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coldpower27 - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
At least then by the time you do replace your machines hopefully Intel will be more competitive in this spaceAnemone - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Honestly it doesn't hurt to bring the point home again and again about Opteron. Those making buying decisions who are still stuck on Intel only solutions need the truth laid out for them regularly and repeatedly, imo. Thank you for doing that, because the current Intel solutions are a waste of money, and I hate that the most of all.:)
johnzo - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Are your test result comments correct? ie DVD Store Test, should the AMD lead be 40% not 29% ?AMD has 8853 more orders, which is 40% more than 21782.The same error (?) goes for the other percentages mentioned.
If I am wrong please forgive somebody with an old brain !
Jason Clark - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
You are correct, my mistake. This is fixed.psychobriggsy - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Right, using funky-maths, if a 2.6GHz Conroe is 20% faster than a 2.8GHz X2.And this 8-core 2.6GHz (?) Opteron system is 40% faster than a 3GHz 8-core Xeon.
And the issue is scalability, i.e., the same problem will exist for Woodcrest.
However Woodcrest will be 3GHz, but this will only be useful for cache-bound tasks because of the scalability problems (expect all the Intel biased websites to only benchmark Woodcrest with this type of task). Maybe Opteron will be dual-core 3GHz by then...
Anyway I can't conclude anything without making huge vast leaps of guesswork, but yes, it will be very close later this year, but if Woodcrest can't beat Opteron because of the platform limitations then there will be little to no incentive to switch back from buying Opteron based servers to Intel based servers (for the companies that have switched to AMD), apart from power consumption.
However it means Intel will stop losing customers to AMD in the server space, if the performance and power consumption issues are addressed. By no means do I see AMD losing much of their gained marketshare however (and by Q4 it will be higher than now I'm sure).
peternelson - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
If power consumption is your concern, then AMD offer reduced power versions of Opteron chips (eg the HE models) at increased cost. When they can migrate to 65nm process, we should see even better power economy.
Furen - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Here's what I think will happen. AMD will get a run for its money on the single-socket and dual-socket arenas (since dual-FSB pretty much keeps the FSB from being too limiting) but once you scale higher AMD will once again rule the roost. I also think that quad-core will be better on AMD's architecture, too, since throwing 4 Conroe/Woodcrest cores on a single FSB (266MHz I'd expect, though I suppose it could be 333) will give these cores a huge performance hit, more so in MP configurations (just thinking about the cache-coherency traffic for 8 cores scares me)coldpower27 - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Maybe, but it's hard to say at this point, how low FSB speed will affect Core Architecture, plus this is the Xeon MP space, where it won't be transistioning to Core Architecture for sometime until Q1 2007 earliest from what I believe with the Clovertown MP/Tigerton Core, I don't think there is a Woodcrest equivalent for this space.I expect AMD to have the "FSB" advantage in 4-8 way situations yes, however this may or may not translate to a performance crown for AMD.
Thoug I think it's pretty safe for Intel that they can take back the Xeon DP space with Woodcrest, and DIB.
JarredWalton - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
I think you need to remember a couple of things. First, Woodcrest is based off of the next-generation Core architecture. Power and performance characteristics will be completely different from the current NetBurst chips. Second, Woodcrest will also have a 1333 MHz front side bus -- twice as fast as the server benchmarked here. Finally, and I could be wrong on this, but I think Intel is looking at one shared front side bus for every two sockets, and they could potentially move to one front side bus for each socket.That last idea would make sense for quad-core. And speaking of quad core, that's such a significant change that again it's almost impossible to predict at this stage. I mean, we don't even really know how AMD or Intel are going to build their quad core packages. Are we talking a single die, or will they have multiple dice on a package? Will Intel change the way the dice communicate with each other?
Of course, none of this things means that Intel will come out on top, but there are enough significant changes that we can't declare a victor at this point. Also, large L3 caches can indeed help server work. Otherwise, why would IBM even make a POWER5 chip with 128 MB of L3 cache? Adding tons of cache to a desktop system rarely helps, but enterprise servers are completely different beast.
At the very least, things should get interesting later this year. :-)
Furen - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
You are indeed correct.In the DVD store test the AMD system is indeed 40% faster than the Intel system, but the Intel system is 30% slower than the AMD one. He seems to have chosen the AMD scores as the reference but incorrectly says that AMD is 30% faster instead of saying that Intel is 30% slower.