Intel Xeon 7460: Six Cores to Bulldoze Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on September 23, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Power
The Opteron may have a slight disadvantage here as it has a 1200W PSU instead of a 1000W unit. We had no choice as our 1U server with 1000W PSU that we used in our previous reviews is not supported by ESX. Our Supermicro SC828TQ-R1200LPB 2U works very well with ESX, but it may consume a few extra Watts. (Or perhaps not - without testing both PSUs we really don't know their efficiency curves.) All Xeons use the exact same chassis, motherboard and power supply. We decided to test with both 16GB and 32GB. In our benchmarking scenario we only needed 16GB, as our VMs were very processing intensive and didn't need more memory. In the real world, it is much more likely that most of your VMs need far less processing power and will require more memory (especially when you run more VMs). The extra data point allows you to understand how much power eight extra DIMMs require, allowing you to estimate how much power your setup will consume.
| System Power Comparison | |||
| Typical CPU load | Power with 6 VMs at full load (16GB) |
Power with 6 VMs at full load (32GB) |
|
| Xeon 7330 (2.4GHz) | 91-96% | 456 | 541 |
| Xeon 7350 (2.93GHz) | 90-95% | 605 | 692 |
| Xeon X7460 (2.66GHz) | 85-90% | 502 | 587 |
| Opteron 8356 (2.3GHz) | 95-99% | 485 | 534 |
It's amazing to see that the 6-core X7460 is capable of staying well below its older 65nm brother, the X7350 at 2.93GHz. Both CPUs have the same TDP, but the 6-core X7460 consumes 25W less per CPU than the X7350. Part of this can be explained by slightly lower CPU usage as the 24 cores do not have to work as hard to handle the six VMs. The X7460 is a huge chip, but that does not prevent the newest Xeon from performing 45% better while consuming 25W less per CPU.
| Transactions per Watt | |
| Xeon 7330 (2.4GHz) | 3.93 |
| Xeon 7350 (2.93GHz) | 3.26 |
| Xeon X7460 (2.66GHz) | 5.59 |
| Opteron 8356 (2.3GHz) | 5.26 |
This table also helps explain why it is so important for Intel not to wait for a Xeon Nehalem MP to regain the performance crown. The current Xeon 73xx MP line takes a serious beating from the Opteron when it comes to virtualized performance/Watt. However, this table also makes it clear that the current Opteron has no chance of beating the 45nm Xeon MP. If we use the 8360SE (2.5GHz) instead of the 8356, performance will rise 8% at the most, but power consumption will probably increase by 20-30%, resulting in an even worse performance/Watt result.
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duploxxx - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
your virtualisation life was very short, perhaps marketing can keep you alive for a while since on paper you are better with the amount of cores.your 24 cores @2,66ghz are just killed by 16cores @2,7ghz
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html">http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html
synergyek - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Why only testing scanline render? It's a slow and old monster. Can you add mental ray render to your tests or, maybe, vray, which is used in arch. visualizations? Also you can use Maya 32/64-bit (software, hardware, mental ray tests) for both windows and linux platforms. Mental ray on Vray uses all cores available in the system, and results must be much better, than ordinary scanline.duploxxx - Saturday, September 27, 2008 - link
Nice article, altough in virtualisation with VMmark it was already clear that the new dunnington had more headroom with the additional cores.only few remark, since you are talking about a retail price of +25000euro you could at least add for information that there are 8socket barcelona for about 5000euro more that scale again way better then dunnington with its 32 cores. So indeed intel did a step up again after there tigertown was heavy beaten by new barcelona in 4s even in low speed but at a certain cost of platform, afterall this dunnington is not cheap. it will be the question what a 4s shangai @3.0 ghz will do against this 6 core giant, afterall it is a huge die and the shangai will be way cheaper and consume less.
lets hope you update this nice article with the soon to be released shangai.
Sirlach - Friday, September 26, 2008 - link
From my research when the hex cores were announced the super micro boards came with an x16 slot. Is it possible to see how CPU restricted multithreaded games perform on this monster? Since it is running server 2008 this is theoretically possible!BaronMatrix - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
It seems like a better comparison would be with the number of cores the same. You could take a 4S and remove one chip and match that against a 2S Dunnington.From what I saw, it is nowhere near 50% faster though it has 50% more cores plus 4 times the cache. It looks like Intel may NEVER catch up with Opteron. Shanghai will just increase the difference.
It's just a shame Hector decided to have a "devalue the brand name" fire-sale or we'd be much closer to Bulldozer and SSE5.
trivik12 - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
4S has been one market where AMD dominated even after conroe's release. With Tigerton intel chipped away AMD's market share bcos of barcelona issues. with Dunnington Intel has a performance advantage. U dont look at per core performance but overall platform performance. AMD needs to catch up soon bcos with beckton AMD will be behind 8th ball in that market as well.snakeoil - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
intel is cannibalizing nehalem this are desperate measures from a desperate man.this is a dead end road, sooner or later intel will have to dump the front side bus,but its evident that intel is not very confident about nehalem and quick path.
these processor are the last kick of an agonizing technology.
this is just a souped up old car. nothing more.
kingmouf - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
Although a good thing for testing, I'm wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems.Off-chip activity (coming from signal amplifiers, sensors, external buses etc) results in great power consumption. Actually one should expect it to be a crucial part of the total consumption of a system. In this case, I believe the AMD system has an advantage with the memory controller being incorporated in the processor chip. To one extend this also becomes clear in your testing.
Comparing the Intel CPUs one may observe that the 6-core part has a huge cache memory that seriously limits the main memory accesses. In the case of the 6VMs, there will also be reduced inter-socket communication. Both result in very serious reductions in off-chip activity, which materialises in a whopping 25% reduction in power usage.
Therefore I believe that making the benchmarking process more memory intensive, as you point is the real-world scenario, AMD could earn quite a few points there.
On a more general argument now, I can't stop thinking that chips like the 74xx Xeons are somewhat a waste of transistors. Intel is simply following the "bully" path rather than the "smart" path. I cannot stop thinking what would the results look like if instead of the two extra cores and the huge amount of cache, Intel added a TCP offload engine, a true hardware RAID controller, a block cipher accelerator, a DSP engine or an extra FP processor core (I'm not mentioning a memory controller because someone will pop up and say that they have already done that in the nehalem). All these things - and one could add much more - are integral to any server or HPC system and I believe can offer much more countable results than the two extra cores. Better performance and definitely better power usage. On the other hand, considering the weaknesses of AMD, maybe that is the company that should really get down to it.
Not long there was a lot of hype of AMD opening up their socket and coherent HyperTransport so that people could actually produce accelerators. What has happened with that? Are there any products on that market? It would be interesting to see some benchmarking with these things. :)
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link
"Im wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems. "You are right that most virtualized workloads (including the OLTP ones) will need a lot more memory *space*, but they are not necessarily more memory intensive. It is good practice for example to use another scheduler to make it more CPU intensive: you are getting more transactions per second on the same machine. It is pretty bad to lose your watts on anything else but transactions.
jedz - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link
It's pretty obvious that AMD is not competing neck to neck in the server arena with their current opteron offerings because of the fact that they are way behind Intel's, and it's not right to compare the opteron to an intel7460 in terms of performance/watt. Why don't you wait for AMD's Shanghai and then redo this benchmarking process.Maybe it will do justice for AMD....