Conclusion
The best news for AMD is that the newly launched 8224SE and 8222 will outperform the current Xeon MP by a significant margin. However, AMD will have very little time to enjoy that victory as the new Xeon MP based on the Core architecture is going to launch very soon. That leads us to the dual socket space. Here's a recap of the various benchmarks that we have run.
Intel has a clear lead in the rendering market. If you are rendering complex high resolutions images, the quad core Xeon is clearly the best choice. If you are rendering normal resolution pictures, quad core might not really pay off, but the dual core Xeon will still be a bit faster than the Opteron. Both Cinebench and 3ds max have been "mildly" optimized for SSE2, but if you use a carefully SSE2 optimized application the Opteron's lack of SSE power is painfully obvious: the Intel CPUs are up to 70% faster in SSE-heavy code. That is one specific area that Barcelona should remedy in the coming months. If you are in for a new server for your FP intensive applications, it might be interesting to wait a bit and see how Harpertown compares to Barcelona; if you can't wait, right now Intel is the first choice in this market.
When it comes to the purely business processing, such as database processing and java applications, we feel that the answer cannot be given so quickly. If your application is usually under high load, the Intel CPUs are clearly better. They use slightly less power than the Opteron SE and run faster. Especially if your application is based on databases such as DB2, Oracle, and MS SQL server, it is clear that the quad core Xeon still rules. The quad core Xeon may not be a "native quad core" design, but it was surely a brilliant move by Intel. Until AMD's own quad core comes out, this market will be out of reach of AMD.
However, some servers are only stressed during a short period of time or are based on mediocre scaling software like MySQL. In that case, the Opteron 2222 makes a lot of sense. The cores will run at a low and cool 1GHz most of the time and consume very little power. Our Tyan Server saved no less than 184W during the "calm periods" and that is a lot of power. That amount of power has to be multiplied by +/- 1.5 (adding your air conditioning's energy consumption) to calculate the total energy consumption savings, making power savings even more significant. During periods of high load, the Opteron 2222 still offers decent performance at a slightly lower price than the dual core 3.0GHz Xeons.
The most interesting thing about AMD's latest launch is probably that AMD has now a 3GHz Opteron that consumes very little when running at low load while it keeps the power consumption reasonable at full load. The Opteron 2224 SE will only interest the people who have already invested in clusters of cheap socket F servers and who are looking to squeeze more performance out of them. If you haven't made that investment already, there's nothing really new or surprising with the latest launch, so you might be best off waiting a bit longer to see what the future holds.
The best news for AMD is that the newly launched 8224SE and 8222 will outperform the current Xeon MP by a significant margin. However, AMD will have very little time to enjoy that victory as the new Xeon MP based on the Core architecture is going to launch very soon. That leads us to the dual socket space. Here's a recap of the various benchmarks that we have run.
| Performance Comparison | |||
| General applications | Opteron 3.2GHz vs. DC Xeon 3GHz | Opteron 3GHz vs. DC Xeon 3GHz | Opteron 3GHz vs. QC Xeon 2.33GHz |
| General applications | |||
| WinRAR 3.62 | 8% | 5% | -17% |
| 3D Applications | |||
| 3DS Max 9 | -11% | -16% | -34% |
| Cinebench 9 | 0% | -7% | -14% |
| zVisuel 3D Kribi Engine | -31% | -32% | -40% |
| Server applications | |||
| SPECjbb | 0% | -4% | -30% |
| MySQL | -12% | N/A | N/A |
Intel has a clear lead in the rendering market. If you are rendering complex high resolutions images, the quad core Xeon is clearly the best choice. If you are rendering normal resolution pictures, quad core might not really pay off, but the dual core Xeon will still be a bit faster than the Opteron. Both Cinebench and 3ds max have been "mildly" optimized for SSE2, but if you use a carefully SSE2 optimized application the Opteron's lack of SSE power is painfully obvious: the Intel CPUs are up to 70% faster in SSE-heavy code. That is one specific area that Barcelona should remedy in the coming months. If you are in for a new server for your FP intensive applications, it might be interesting to wait a bit and see how Harpertown compares to Barcelona; if you can't wait, right now Intel is the first choice in this market.
When it comes to the purely business processing, such as database processing and java applications, we feel that the answer cannot be given so quickly. If your application is usually under high load, the Intel CPUs are clearly better. They use slightly less power than the Opteron SE and run faster. Especially if your application is based on databases such as DB2, Oracle, and MS SQL server, it is clear that the quad core Xeon still rules. The quad core Xeon may not be a "native quad core" design, but it was surely a brilliant move by Intel. Until AMD's own quad core comes out, this market will be out of reach of AMD.
However, some servers are only stressed during a short period of time or are based on mediocre scaling software like MySQL. In that case, the Opteron 2222 makes a lot of sense. The cores will run at a low and cool 1GHz most of the time and consume very little power. Our Tyan Server saved no less than 184W during the "calm periods" and that is a lot of power. That amount of power has to be multiplied by +/- 1.5 (adding your air conditioning's energy consumption) to calculate the total energy consumption savings, making power savings even more significant. During periods of high load, the Opteron 2222 still offers decent performance at a slightly lower price than the dual core 3.0GHz Xeons.
The most interesting thing about AMD's latest launch is probably that AMD has now a 3GHz Opteron that consumes very little when running at low load while it keeps the power consumption reasonable at full load. The Opteron 2224 SE will only interest the people who have already invested in clusters of cheap socket F servers and who are looking to squeeze more performance out of them. If you haven't made that investment already, there's nothing really new or surprising with the latest launch, so you might be best off waiting a bit longer to see what the future holds.
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piroroadkill - Tuesday, August 7, 2007 - link
it is a car analogyGul Westfale - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
good analogy there, except that mustangs (and various other cars) use pickup truck engines for cost reasons. large trucks use larger engines (often diesels) because they offer considerably more torque at much lower RPM than a smaller gasoline engine; and thus provide more pulling power.Gul Westfale - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
these are not regular consumer cpus, but intended for use in commercial servers and workstations. they and their motherboards cost more because they support features such as multiple sockets (so in addition to having multiple cores on one chip you can also have multiple chips on one motherboard).yyrkoon - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
they win 1 of 2 tests, and it is clear they are the winner ? Why ? Because they won the software rendering also ? Anyone interrested enough in rendering, and HAVING to have this sort of hardware for it is NOT going to bother with software . . .
This means your conclusion on this point is incorrect, and in which case, it boils down to which application the rendering machine is going to do.
Man you guys come to the wierdest conclusions based on your own data, and I am not even the first to notice/mention this sort of thing . . .
JohanAnandtech - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
The Quadcore wins all high resolution rendering tests. Where do you see the DC opterons win against the Quadcore Intel in high resolution rendering? Show me a rendering engine where a 3 GHz K8 DC core is faster in high resolution renderering than a 2.33 GHz Quadcore. All decent and used in the realworld rendering engines will more or less show the same picture.In fact, the "rendering performance" situation will get worse for the K8 as SSE-2 tuning will get more common. All Intel CPUs since core and all AMD CPUs since Barcelona will show (or are already showing) high performance boost from using better SSE-2 code.
yyrkoon - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
Ok, I see now with the graphs 'lower is better' on 3ds max, I missed that with the tables, which is actually what I meant this morning 'table obfustication'. I personally do not mind tables, but when the data is not in a uniform spot, it confuses/makes it harder to read at a glance.Anyhow, I was tired when I posted this morning, cranky, and was overly harsh I think. However it *is* much easier for me personaly to read the graphs at a glance (I cannot speak for everyone though).
yyrkoon - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
Oh, and while on the subject, you guys here at anandtech have lately mastered the art of graph obfustication. Is it really THAT hard leaving items in the same rows / columns for different tests ? Are we trying to confuse the results, or is there some other reason this happens, and has gone completely over my head ?JohanAnandtech - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
The only reason is that until very recently I didn't master the graphing engine. I got some weird error messages and gave up. But I have found the error, and you should see some nice graphs which don't obfusticate...Spoelie - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
the gif on page 2 is non-looping, so after a very quick jump from 1ghz -> 2.8ghz (why??) -> 3.2ghz , it stays put on the 3.2ghz image. If reading the article, by the time the reader sees the image, it's already 5 minutes on the last image and staying there, making it for all intents and purposes a static image instead of an animated one:)
JohanAnandtech - Monday, August 6, 2007 - link
Thanks, fixed that. The reason to show 2.8 GHz is that for example Specjbb and other applications sometimes don't completely stress the CPU and then the cpu dynamically goes back to 2.8 GHz. It are simply the 3 stages I saw the most, and found the most interesting to show.