Intel "Harpertown" Xeon vs. AMD "Barcelona" Opteron
by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on September 18, 2007 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
Finally we had an opportunity to pit two quad-core parts from the CPU giants against each other and see who has the better part. The question is, what makes a better processor? Is it how quickly it can accomplish a given workload? Is it how much performance it offers over how much it costs? Is it how much performance it offers over how much power it consumes? The answer is more than likely all of the above in some proportion.
Performance
Intel has made some successful changes to the quad-core Xeon that have helped it achieve as much as a 56% lead in performance over the 2.0GHz Barcelona part. Of course this is mostly due to the fact that the Harpertown part has a 1GHz clock speed advantage, and the various micro-architecture tweaks surely help fill in the rest. It's clear that AMD has potential with Barcelona, and it will be extremely interesting to see where they end up as clock-speed ramps. With 2.5GHz parts due out before the end of the year, the difference between AMD and Intel may not be all that great - barring any other announcements, of course.
Performance / Watt
AMD has always been extremely strong in performance/watt, especially at the lower load levels and even more so at idle. Barcelona uses the least amount of watts at idle and manages to come close to the new Harpertown parts on AS3AP; however, Intel due to its 1GHz clock advantage takes the lead on every other benchmark, particularly at higher loads. Again, AMD needs to ramp clock speed in order to compete with Intel, and it looks like that will happen over the next few months. The question is, will it come soon enough to start winning back some market-share?
Price
While Barcelona is still difficult to get ahold of, the expected price of the Opteron 2350 should be around $400. Harpertown is brand new, so we're not yet able to find any prices in the retail market, but the expected price for the E5472 will be around $1000 when the 1600FSB parts launch. The new Harpertown E5430 (2.66GHz) is expected to cost close to $450 while the E5420 (2.33GHz) will cost closer to $320. FB-DIMMs carry a slight price premium over registered DDR2-667 ECC memory, but these days RAM prices are pretty much comparable. The bottom line is that for 2S systems, it appears that AMD may have a small pricing advantage at the low-end (at least until any Intel price cuts occur). However, considering the overall cost of a well equipped 2S server/workstation, saving a few hundred dollars for equivalent performance may not be enough to sway purchasing decisions.
Two weeks ago, AMD's standing in the IT world was definitely in question. Barcelona may not be the knockout punch that many were hoping for, but it definitely makes them far more competitive. The fact that Barcelona is a drop-in replacement for existing Socket-F systems certainly doesn't hurt, although we could say the same thing about Harpertown and existing Intel Core systems. There is of course one area where AMD still does have an advantage: 4-way and higher server configurations, where their Direct Connect topology has some distinct advantages that may not be overcome for quite some time. All we need now is to see how fast AMD can ramp up production and availability of Barcelona, and how far they are able to push clock speeds. It will still be difficult for them to gain market share, but at least they should be able to stop the bleeding and hopefully return to profitability.
Update: For those that are looking for more details and wondering why certain other chips aren't included, at the time testing was conducted we did not have any of the faster 2.5GHz Barcelona chips (or the slower Harpertowns). That situation has been remedied in terms of AMD's CPUs, and we will have some update articles looking at how the faster Barcelona compares with other processors. Stay tuned....
Finally we had an opportunity to pit two quad-core parts from the CPU giants against each other and see who has the better part. The question is, what makes a better processor? Is it how quickly it can accomplish a given workload? Is it how much performance it offers over how much it costs? Is it how much performance it offers over how much power it consumes? The answer is more than likely all of the above in some proportion.
Performance
Intel has made some successful changes to the quad-core Xeon that have helped it achieve as much as a 56% lead in performance over the 2.0GHz Barcelona part. Of course this is mostly due to the fact that the Harpertown part has a 1GHz clock speed advantage, and the various micro-architecture tweaks surely help fill in the rest. It's clear that AMD has potential with Barcelona, and it will be extremely interesting to see where they end up as clock-speed ramps. With 2.5GHz parts due out before the end of the year, the difference between AMD and Intel may not be all that great - barring any other announcements, of course.
Performance / Watt
AMD has always been extremely strong in performance/watt, especially at the lower load levels and even more so at idle. Barcelona uses the least amount of watts at idle and manages to come close to the new Harpertown parts on AS3AP; however, Intel due to its 1GHz clock advantage takes the lead on every other benchmark, particularly at higher loads. Again, AMD needs to ramp clock speed in order to compete with Intel, and it looks like that will happen over the next few months. The question is, will it come soon enough to start winning back some market-share?
Price
While Barcelona is still difficult to get ahold of, the expected price of the Opteron 2350 should be around $400. Harpertown is brand new, so we're not yet able to find any prices in the retail market, but the expected price for the E5472 will be around $1000 when the 1600FSB parts launch. The new Harpertown E5430 (2.66GHz) is expected to cost close to $450 while the E5420 (2.33GHz) will cost closer to $320. FB-DIMMs carry a slight price premium over registered DDR2-667 ECC memory, but these days RAM prices are pretty much comparable. The bottom line is that for 2S systems, it appears that AMD may have a small pricing advantage at the low-end (at least until any Intel price cuts occur). However, considering the overall cost of a well equipped 2S server/workstation, saving a few hundred dollars for equivalent performance may not be enough to sway purchasing decisions.
Two weeks ago, AMD's standing in the IT world was definitely in question. Barcelona may not be the knockout punch that many were hoping for, but it definitely makes them far more competitive. The fact that Barcelona is a drop-in replacement for existing Socket-F systems certainly doesn't hurt, although we could say the same thing about Harpertown and existing Intel Core systems. There is of course one area where AMD still does have an advantage: 4-way and higher server configurations, where their Direct Connect topology has some distinct advantages that may not be overcome for quite some time. All we need now is to see how fast AMD can ramp up production and availability of Barcelona, and how far they are able to push clock speeds. It will still be difficult for them to gain market share, but at least they should be able to stop the bleeding and hopefully return to profitability.
Update: For those that are looking for more details and wondering why certain other chips aren't included, at the time testing was conducted we did not have any of the faster 2.5GHz Barcelona chips (or the slower Harpertowns). That situation has been remedied in terms of AMD's CPUs, and we will have some update articles looking at how the faster Barcelona compares with other processors. Stay tuned....
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Justin Case - Tuesday, September 18, 2007 - link
Anyone else feel that the first image...http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/it/2007/barcel...">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/it/2007/barcel...
...looks somewhat... er... phallic?
TA152H - Tuesday, September 18, 2007 - link
Oh my, you're absolutely right.That's really foul. Even the area between the Tick and Tock looks like the urethra. It's so wrong. Is that really the only way they could have presented the information? I mean, if they wanted to get pornographic, couldn't they have used a woman's breasts? Right one for Tick, left one for Tock? It's much more attractive than this.
Regs - Tuesday, September 18, 2007 - link
Marketing geniuses. Intel at its best. A better product, with a bigger...In all do seriousness, It's no surprise AMD can't compete with an architecture that's been out for over a year. AMD needs more tweaks and needs more clock speed. I just hope they don't disappoint again like they did with the K8. 4-5 years of stagnation.
TA152H - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
I think it comes down to Intel being wiser than AMD. They were always smarter, as evidenced by their much more advanced processors like the P7 and Itanium. But AMD was wiser, and chose an easier path that also performed better. Intel had all the great technology, super-advanced trail blazing stuff that just didn't work that well. AMD made the same mistake by going native quad-core before they were ready. Consequently, they have a poor performing part compared to what Intel has, today, and promises for tomorrow. Obviously, the extent of their failure isn't as deep-rooted as the Pentium 4 was and at least the Barcelona can be improved (mainly by clock speed) more quickly, but the big problem is that the Barcelona is getting raped by Intel processors using FB-DIMMS. You add clock speed to the Barcelona, and the power goes up (everything else being equal). You change FB-DIMMS out, and you get better performance and lower power. So, the future doesn't look that bright for AMD, despite the fact they should gain clock speed pretty quickly. It's unlikely to help their power/performance much. Intel using more appropriate memory will to a great extent. Also, if AMD does manage to get close to Intel in performance, Intel will just release a higher performing part. They can hit much higher than 3.2 with their G0 stepping, so it's really a matter of whether it makes marketing sense.But, it sure sounds good to have native quad-core, and they sure were smart to do it. Right? Just like Intel was to come out with trace-cache, double-pumped ALUs, and super-pipelining and unheard of clock speeds.
But all that aside, if they can get the clock speeds up to a reasonable amount, and increase the size of the pathetic caches (yes, I know they are limited by the IMC and it limits it, but still 512K????) and in a release or two get full memory disambiguation, they will have a really good product. It will at least be competitive.
Justin Case - Tuesday, September 18, 2007 - link
Any reason why the AMD system had 16 GB of RAM (8x2GB) while the Intel system had only 8GB (4x2GB)?Also, any reason for the big differences in cooling (AMD system had 7 fans, Intel system had 3)? If the Barcelona system actually uses <i>less power</i>, as your numbers show, surely it can't dissipate <i>more</i> heat.
When you're measuring the power consumption of the whole system (and extrapolating that to the power efficiency of each CPU), you should try to make the configurations match as closely as possible, no? Not to mention that the amount of RAM can have an influence on the actual system performance.
I could understand different configurations if you were testing systems at a specific price point (and couldn't "afford" more RAM for the Intel system due to the more expensive CPUs, for example), but that wasn't the case here.
Xspringe - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
I would really like to see updated benchmark scores as well! It only seems fair to add more ram to the xeon, for it might improve the benchmark scores and would also increase energy usage (which would be beneficial to the barcelona).Final Hamlet - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
Yuk!I really would like to see an explanation from an editor on this critique...
Justin Case - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
Add the unusual choice of benchmark and fact that Harpertown isn't actually due to be launched until November, and I think this is one (more) article we can file under the "iNandtel" section.Speaking of that, anyone know what happened to GamePC's "Labs" section? Along with the Tech Report they were probably one of the last sites with a steady output of meaningful, objective reviews of PC hardware.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
IMPORTANT UPDATE INFORMATION:There was a typo/error in the original config. We apologize for the confusion - I should have verified with Jason/Ross earlier. The Opteron setup was running 8x1GB, not 8x2GB. Sorry to pop all the conspiracy theories (again), but the systems are a lot more similar than you would apparently like to believe.
Note also the update at the end: 2.5GHz Barcelona is on its way and will be tested shortly. We'll see how that compares with the higher clocked Harpertown.
Proteusza - Thursday, September 20, 2007 - link
With the last Quad Core Comes to Play article, and now this, I've completely lost faith in Anandtech's benchmarks.These guys are too clever for them to make a mistake like that, and if they did I'm sure they would see the mistake and rebenchmark.
No, I think these benchmarks were just paid for by Intel, in anticipation of its November launch to steal AMD's thunder. I'm not accusing the entire site of constant bias towards Intel, but rather a bias towards advertising. AMD has probably done the same thing in the past, and I'm sure Anandtech has been happy to oblige.