Intel "Harpertown" Xeon vs. AMD "Barcelona" Opteron

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....