Eight Core Servers: Opteron 880 (Egypt) vs. Xeon MP 3.0 GHz (Paxville)

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.