AMD's 3rd generation Opteron versus Intel's 45nm Xeon: a closer look
by Johan De Gelas on November 27, 2007 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Fritz Chess Benchmark (Windows 32-bit)
WinRAR and Fritz Chess are probably less important to most people than the other benchmarks we ran. However, the reason why we include them in this article is that their profile is so different from the other applications. In this way, we get more insight into the different new architectures.
| Fritz Chess | |
| Profile | Total |
| Average IPC (on AMD 2350) | 0.99 |
| Instruction mix | |
| Floating Point | 4% |
| SSE | 0% |
| Branches | 17% |
| Performance indicators on Opteron 2350 | |
| Branch misprediction | 12% |
| L1 datacache ratio | 0.65 |
| L1 Instruction ratio | 0.37 |
| L1 datacache miss | 1% |
| L1 Instruction cache miss | 1% |
| L2 cache miss | 0% |
We have said this before but it warrants repeating: you'll find a decent amount of complex branches in a chess program. 17% branches is not that extraordinary, but the fact that 12% of those branches are mispredicted is. If we compare a 2GHz Opteron 22xx with an Opteron 23xx, we should see if the improvements in branch prediction pay off.
The Opteron 2350 is about 3% faster than the Opteron 22xx, core for core, clock for clock. We believe we can assume that the branch prediction improvements are minor, as the Fritz chess benchmark runs in the L1 and L2 cache.
HPC
Several of the HPC benchmarks are too expensive for us to test, but we can get some information from AMD's and Intel's own benchmarking. According to Intel, the new Intel Xeon 5472 (1.89 score) is about 26% faster than the Xeon 5365 (1.5 score) when running the fluent benchmark. According to AMD, the Opteron 2350 is about 10% to 60% faster than a 2.33GHz Xeon E5345. That doesn't give us much comparison data, but at first sight it seems that AMD will be competitive in Fluent even at lower clock speeds (2.5GHz versus 3GHz).
We get a little more data in LS-DYNA. Both AMD and Intel have published results.
Intel's own marketing material seems to admit that a Xeon E5472 with 800MHz memory is just as a fast as AMD's quad-core at 2GHz. AMD's 2.5GHz model will surely take the lead in LS-DYNA. Looking at the Fluent and LS-DYNA benchmarks it appears that AMD will remain very competitive in the HPC market.
One benchmark where Intel's newest chip really shines is the Black-Scholes algorithm: as most of the calculations involve divisions, the new Xeon 54xx chips are about 50% faster than their older Xeon 53xx siblings, clock for clock. Unfortunately, our compilation of Black-Scholes failed on the quad-core AMD, so we have to postpone those results for now.
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tshen83 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Seriously, can you buy the 2360SE? Newegg doesn't even stock the 1.7Ghz 2344HEs.The same situation exist on the Phenom line of CPUs. I don't see the value of reviewing Phenom 9700, 9900s when AMD cannot deliver them. I am trouble locating Phenom 9500s.
alantay - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
The MySQL scalability problem is not so much in MySQL as in the Linux kernel and Glibc used.To have it scale correctly to 8 CPUs you need kernel 2.6.22.x (alternatively you could try with a 2.6.24-RC -should be a bit faster-, but not with 2.6.23.x) and Glibc 2.6 or higher.
A default Ubuntu 7.10 for example should scale well with MySQL (OpenSUSE 10.3 *might* work, but they have backported the 2.6.23 scheduler which has a scalability problem).
Thanks for the article!
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Excellent feedback.It is a bit frustrating that once again you need some ultra new kernel and libraries to get good scalability. THat is unrealistic for people who use SLES and who rely on their support contract to get updates.
MGSsancho - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
how about opensolaris? i dont know how much different it is from solaris 10, but it should be able to scale to dozens of cores nicely. I was about to ask about oracle and DB2 benchmarks but you answered that in your article; expensive, and the oems usually publish that info.anyways awesome article
Roy2001 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I cannot find a SINGLE one, nowhere.drebo - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Newegg has the Phenom 9500 in stock. At least, they did yesterday. I've also got a vendor I use that has them in stock.JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
But Phenom isn't Opteron 23xx. Different socket, different market, and it has L3. (Does Phenom X4 have an L3 cache? Maybe I should go check....)drebo - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Yes, Phenom 9500 has an L3. But if you look at his question (in the subject line), he is asking about barcelona as a whole and phenom specifically. The answer is Yes, they are available.Slaimus - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
They may be gobbled by up Cray for that Budapest supercomputer.Regs - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I would not expect any from vendors and wholesalers until early next year.Matter of fact I wouldn't want one until then anyhow. I would at least wait until B3 stepping.