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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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.
TA152H - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Johan,From my understanding, x87 is now obsolete and not even supported in x86-64. Can you verify this? I know I had read it, from your article you state that Intel improved it, so I'm not as sure. I had assumed one of AMD's handicaps was the disproportionate, and nearly useless, x87 processing power their processors carried, but now I am not as sure. Is x87 supported in x86-64, and if not, why would Intel increase their x87 capabilities when it's clearly a deprecated technology?
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
The x87 instructions can be used in legacy mode and long mode. But it is true that Scalar SSE instructions are preferred by AMD and Intel.x87 performance as many 32 bit programs are still important (look at 3DSMAx 32 bit).
If Intel's newest Core architecture would not have improved the x87 FP it would probably have looked silly as so many 32 bit programs still use it intensively. Secondly, as you can see, things like the Radix-16 circuitry are used by both the SIMD as the x87 units.
Gholam - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Do you have any plans to benchmark Opteron vs Xeon in an ESX Server environment?DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
This is exactly what I was thinking of too. I want to change my mode of working to run several separate VM's, one for programming, one for Office etc and really want to know how Phenom compares to Q6600 for those uses. Well, this article looks at the server versions of those chips but for VMware the performance might be more comparable than, say, SuperPi 1M benchmarks!DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I forgot to add, since Phenom would presumably also have the nested table support as Barcelona, how much performance improvement would this yield? I'd love to knowsht - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I was about to ask the same question after reading the concludingYou may feel for example that using four instances in our SPECjbb test favors AMD too much, but there is no denying that using more virtual machines on fewer physical servers is what is happening in the real world.
Since the CPUs have features that should accelerate virtualization, it would really be interesting to see how they compete there. My only addition to your request would be to add KVM as host as well (and XEN and what not as well if you care, though I really think only KVM is of interest).
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.AssBall - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Thanks, Johan.This has been one of the clearer and better proofread articles I have read here lately. It was interesting, unbiased, and insightful. I am excited to see what you get into for your next project.