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AMD quad-core Opteron servers claim performance records

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

April 9, 2008, 6:43 PM

The return of AMD to any kind of dominant position in the CPU market depends on its ability to be perceived by systems analysis personnel as the performance leader. Today, the company obtained some much-needed ammunition in that battle.

The question prospective customers have been asking recently about AMD is whether its reticence to produce a 3.0 GHz+ quad-core CPU will hurt it, not only in head-to-head matchups against Intel Xeon but with respect to its perception as a potential performance champion. Today, AMD claimed leading scores among turned in by three separate x86-based servers, all of them HP ProLiant models.

Today, BetaNews confirmed that the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has officially recorded scores from a four-way quad-core HP ProLiant DL585 G5 rack-mounted server, running on Opteron 8356 processors clocked at 2.3 GHz. Granted, this ends up being a 16-core system, which is on the high end of the scale. But a base score on the SPECfp_2006 floating point throughput rate test of 143 and a peak score of 157 is right about where AMD wants to be.

And in the same tests, the HP ProLiant BL685c G5 blade server, running the same Opteron 8356, scored slightly better: 147 for the base score, which represents a performance average, and 161 for the maximum observed (peak) throughput rate.

To get any sense of what that means, you have to make some comparisons. HP had previously submitted test scores for a four-way quad-core ProLiant DL580 G5, which is a rack-mounted server that runs on 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon X7350 processors. On the same test, the Intel-based DL580 scored a 106 base rate, and a peak rate of 116.

BetaNews today located an Opteron 8356 quad-core processor selling for $1,649, and an Intel Xeon X7350 selling for $2,389.

In two-way quad-core configurations, an HP ProLiant DL385 G5 running 2.3 GHz Opteron 2356 processors also posted a leading score: an 81.1 base score and an 89.3 peak score. A similarly-configured rack-mount ProLiant DL380 G5 running 3.16 GHz Intel Xeon X5460 processors scored a 70.1 base and a 78.2 peak.

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By Andreas2000

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 7:19 PM

AMD does scale better with more CPU's because of hypertransport. This is my guess anyway.. but this advantage only lasts until Intel unleashes their Nehalem CPU's with quickpath.

Score: 0

By Heero

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 1:50 PM

It's nice to see AMD products standing well againts Intel again.

Hopefully AMD can keep this momemtum going, and keep the market interesting. This will keep both Intel and AMD coming up with new products, and keep prices down.

Score: 0

By 2ears

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 5:30 AM

" The return of AMD to any kind of dominant position in the CPU market "

Does Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews writer, really read back what he wrote ?

When is the last time AMD was in any kind of dominant position in the CPU market ?

Score: 0

By Setian^Stalker

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 5:59 AM

Few years back now
it says 'any kind of dominant' and AMD once did have the edge over the P4. Intel had a pretty s***ty period before they started coming out all guns firing.

Score: 0

By psycros

posted Apr 9, 2008 - 8:35 PM

But can it run Doom?

Score: 0

By God Dammit

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 2:35 PM

I doubt AMD's workstation parts are any better than Intel's workstation parts in their Skulltrail platform at running high end games.

Score: 0

By terminalx

posted Apr 9, 2008 - 7:48 PM

This is for server use only...plus at $700 cheaper for better performance, its a no brainer...

Score: 0

By iLLz

posted Apr 9, 2008 - 7:26 PM

Is it me or are you comparing AMD's latest and greatest against Intel's previous generation processors? Perhaps they haven't SPEC'd the newer 45nm parts for Intel in these configs?

Score: 0

By mikeeberhart

posted Apr 9, 2008 - 10:52 PM

Yeah, I want to see how the new Intel 54xx series of 45nm processors performs against this - both in raw processing power, and power consumption. I'm thinking about a new server this year, and I am open to AMD if it is a good value proposition against the new 54xx Intel CPUs. Looking forward to such test results.

Score: 0

By DeadFly

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 1:04 PM

I was curious too, so I went looking for an E5410 benchmark which I thought would be a fair match up to the AMD mentioned. Didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I ran across an article that compared some different benchmarks between the E5410 and the previous generation X5355 and the performance gain was significant.

http://www.compute.org.za/node/432

Given the Intel compared in the article has a slower bus as well, it seems the latest Intel would compare well against AMD.

Plus on the issue of price... when I was comaparing Dell server not too long ago, there wasn't much difference in the end price between "equivalent" AMD and Intel based dual, 2 core systems. There were no quad core AMDs at the time.

BTW, I ended up getting a dual E5335 machine to start a virtualization project, then got another of the same machines with dual E5345's. I kept it in the same architecture because I'm hoping to go to Win 2008 Hyper-V eventually and the VMs actually "see" the processor they're running on.

Score: 0

By sysadmin-root

posted Apr 10, 2008 - 2:01 PM

This is an apples to oranges comparison. Go look at the SPEC numbers for yourself and you will see that even the HP ProLiant BL460c (2.33 GHz Intel Xeon E5410 in a 2-way configuration, 8 cores) beats the HP ProLiant BL685c G5 (2.3 GHz AMD Opteron 8356 4-way configuration, 16 cores) in many SPEC result and baseline scores (of course not rates due to the 2-way vs. 4-way configuration differences).

To try to make this a bit more apples to apples in comparison, let's look at two different HP systems.

The HP ProLiant BL685c G5 server blade costs
$13,697.00 for the 8354 AMD Opteron 4-way configuration - the 8356 AMD Opteron is not available for order at this time and would add approximately $600 to the system cost ($150 price difference per processor times 4 processors). As far as power consumption is concerned, the cumulative ACP for the processors alone in this configuration is 300W.

The identically configured HP ProLiant BL460c server blade costs $5,067.00 for the Intel Xeon E5450 2-way configuration. As far as power consumption is concerned, the cumulative ACP for the processors alone in this configuration is 160W.

Looking at what I can actually order today - there is no comparison. I can buy 2 of the Intel systems for considerably less than one of the AMD systems. Since these are blade systems - the Intel offerings become even more attractive. I can buy a 16 blade Intel based system much cheaper than an 8 blade AMD system. The Intel system will outperform the AMD system. The only plus for the AMD system will be in total power consumption - which is negated if you choose to purchase a comparable 4-way Intel system from a different vendor (HP just doesn't offer that configuration with the newer Intel processors).

So, there you have it. But, don't take my word for it - go and investigate the real performance numbers at http://www.spec.org/ and configure/price compare systems for yourself http://www.hp.com/ or look at other vendor offerings for a better comparison.

Whatever you do - do NOT make assumptions and purchase decisions based on this article alone as it presents a biased opinion drawn from only a few SPEC numbers taken from incomparable systems. The Intel Xeon X7350 had SPEC numbers published over 9 month ago.

Score: 0

By yeyang

edited Apr 11, 2008 - 2:10 AM

I don't understand your logic. You are comparing a 2-way 8-core to a 4-way 16-core on single-threaded performance and call it apples to apples?

If you're not looking at SPEC_rate, what's the point of using multi-core/multi-processor systems?

Score: 0

By sysadmin-root

posted Apr 11, 2008 - 9:46 PM

That's partially my point - the systems being compared in the article are not really comparable. The x7350 has been available for close to a year now - why compare it with the latest and greatest Opteron 8356 which you cannot even order yet? And the SPEC numbers reported seem to be hand picked - take a look for yourself (http://www.spec.org/). It looks like the article was taken mostly from an AMD press release. I'm not against AMD, I'm against this type of misleading article. For those of us who work on very large scale systems (256 procs and up), it's a disservice to see this type of article. AMD chips have always done well on SPECfp - but that's not the only benchmark and it only tells you a small piece of the performance equation. For example, a 2-way Intel Xeon E5472 posts 114 base and 139 peak on CINT2006 RATES while the 2-way AMD Opteron 8356 only scores 90 base and 104 peak and the 4-way AMD Opteron 8356 posts 161 base and 185 peak. The 2-way to 2-way doesn't look good for AMD on anything but floating point performance. Sure, the 4-way AMD system has more throughput than the 2-way Intel system for a single board system - but it consumes nearly twice the wattage and costs about 140% more. For cluster and grid systems like those I work on, I could not cost-justify an Opteron 8356 system - period - not even in the dual-socket configurations (where it only delivers similar or lower performance on average compared to the cheaper Xeon system).

I wish the situation were different - but AMD really needs to do more than just push quad socket systems versus dual socket systems. For a workstation (and if cost is no object), by all means - get a 4-way Opteron system. But for large scale server systems - there's really no incentive to go with AMD right now. If they can deliver better frequencies (say 3.1 GHz), that would make a dual socket blade look much more appealing and would definitely make the market more competitive.

Score: 0

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