The Best Server CPUs Compared, Part 1
by Johan De Gelas on December 22, 2008 10:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Pricing
You don't buy a server CPU of course; in most cases you buy a complete server. Still, the impact of the top of the line server CPUs on the total server price is still relatively high, so it does not hurt to compare on price too.
| Server CPU Pricing | |||
| Intel CPU | Price | AMD CPU | Price |
| Xeon X7460 2.66 GHz (6 core, 16 MB) | $2729 | ||
| Xeon E7450 2.4 GHz (6 Core, 12 MB) | $2301 | Opteron 8384 2.7 GHz | $2149 |
| Xeon E7440 2.4 GHz (12 MB) | $1980 | Opteron 8382 2.6 GHz | $1865 |
| Xeon E7430 2.13 GHz (12 MB) | $1391 | Opteron 8380 2.5 GHz | $1514 |
| Xeon E7420 2.13 GHz (8 MB) | $1177 | Opteron 8378 2.4 GHz | $1165 |
| Opteron 8350 2.0GHz | $873 | ||
| Xeon L7455 2.13 GHz (6 core, 12 MB) | $2729 | ||
| Xeon L7445 2.13 GHz (12 MB) | $1980 | Opteron 8347 HE 1.9 GHz | $873 |
The Opteron 8384 is clearly aimed at six-core Xeon 7450 2.4GHz.
| Server CPU Pricing | |||
| Intel CPU | Price | AMD CPU | Price |
| Xeon X5470 3.33 GHz (120W) | $1386 | ||
| Opteron 2384 2.7 GHz (75W) | $989 | ||
| Xeon E5450 3.0 GHz (80W) | $915 | Opteron 2382 2.6 GHz (75W) | $873 |
| Xeon E5440 2.83 GHz (80W) | $690 | Opteron 2380 2.5 GHz (75W) | $698 |
| Xeon E5430 2.66 GHz (80W) | $455 | Opteron 2380 2.4 GHz (75W) | $523 |
| Xeon X5420 2.5 GHz (80W) | $316 | Opteron 2378 2.3 GHz (75W) | $377 |
| Xeon X5410 2.33 GHz (80W) | $256 | ||
| Xeon L5430 2.66 GHz (50W) | $562 | Opteron 8350 HE 2 GHz (55W) | $316 |
Meanwhile, the Opteron 2384 targets the 3GHz Xeon E5450.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
29 Comments
View All Comments
zpdixon42 - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
DDR2-1067: oh, you are right. I was thinking of Deneb.Yes performance/dollar depends on the application you are running, so what I am suggesting more precisely is that you compute some perf/$ metric for every benchmark you run. And even if the CPU price is less negligible compared to the rest of the server components, it is always interesting to look both at absolute perf and perf/$ rather than just absolute perf.
denka - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
32-bit? 1.5Gb SGA? This is really ridiculous. Your tests should be bottlenecked by IOJohanAnandtech - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
I forgot to mention that the database created is slightly larger than 1 GB. And we wouldn't be able to get >80% CPU load if we were bottlenecked by I/Odenka - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
You are right, this is a smallish database. By the way, when you report CPU utilization, would you take IOWait separate from CPU used? If taken together (which was not clear) it is possible to get 100% CPU utilization out of which 90% will be IOWait :)denka - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Not to be negative: excellent article, by the waymkruer - Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - link
If/When AMD does release the Istanbul (k10.5 6-core), The Nehalem will again be relegated to second place for most HPC.Exar3342 - Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - link
Yeah, by that time we will have 8-core Sandy Bridge 32nm chips from Intel...Amiga500 - Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - link
I guess the key battleground will be Shanghai versus Nehalem in the virtualised server space...AMD need their optimisations to shine through.
Its entirely understandable that you could not conduct virtualisation tests on the Nehalem platform, but unfortunate from the point of view that it may decide whether Shanghai is a success or failure over its life as a whole. As always, time is the great enemy! :-)
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - link
"you could not conduct virtualisation tests on the Nehalem platform"Yes. At the moment we have only 3 GB of DDR-3 1066. So that would make pretty poor Virtualization benches indeed.
"unfortunate from the point of view that it may decide whether Shanghai is a success or failure"
Personally, I think this might still be one of Shanghai strong points. Virtualization is about memory bandwidth, cache size and TLBs. Shanghai can't beat Nehalem's BW, but when it comes to TLB size it can make up a bit.
VooDooAddict - Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - link
With the VMWare benchmark, it is really just a measure of the CPU / Memory. Unless you are running applications with very small datasets where everything fits into RAM, the primary bottlenck I've run into is the storage system. I find it much better to focus your hardware funds on the storage system and use the company standard hardware for server platform.This isn't to say the bench isn't useful. Just wanted to let people know not to base your VMWare buildout soley on those numbers.