AMD's Quad-Core Barcelona: Defending New Territory
by Johan De Gelas on September 10, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
It's close to a nightmare to try to review a server CPU in a few days, but we hope we have at least provided you with an idea what AMD's newest quad-core is capable of. We'll summarize our preliminary results with this small table.
Considering that AMD prices this Opteron 2350 under the Xeon 5345, AMD has an attractive price/performance offering for most applications. The only exception is a chess engine and highly optimized Intel binaries. Although our testing is not finished yet, there is very little doubt that AMD's newest chip is very energy efficient. Add to that the fact that the AMD platform is not burdened with the extra power consumption of FB-DIMMs, and it is clear that the third generation of Opterons will lead in the performance/watt area for a few months. When you are looking for the highest performance however, Intel has still a solid advantage with it's 3 GHz Xeon x5365
The future looks very interesting with the 45nm Xeon Harpertown and a 2.5GHz AMD quad-core in the next quarter. AMD hasn't clearly hit a homerun this time, but at least they're playing in the same ballpark.
Again, if you're curious about how quad-core Opteron functions in more of a desktop capacity - as a preview of things to come with the launch of Phenom - don't miss our AMD Phenom Preview article. We tossed in a GeForce 8800 GTX and ran some gaming and general computing performance numbers. It's still a socket 1207 server motherboard, but we limited the comparison to Santa Rosa versus Barcelona Opteron performance in order to focus on the CPU and not on potential platform differences.
It's close to a nightmare to try to review a server CPU in a few days, but we hope we have at least provided you with an idea what AMD's newest quad-core is capable of. We'll summarize our preliminary results with this small table.
| The Opteron 2350 (2 GHz) vs. Xeon "Clovertown" | |
| General applications | Opteron 2350 (2GHz) equates to Xeon clock speed of: |
| WinRAR 3.62 | 2.7 GHz |
| Fritz Chess engine | 1.8 GHz |
| HPC applications | |
| Intel optimized Linpack | 1.9 GHz |
| 3D Applications | |
| 3DS Max 9 | 2 GHz |
| zVisuel 3D Kribi Engine | 2.33 - 2.4 GHz |
| zVisuel 3D Kribi Engine (AA) | 2.4 GHz |
| Server applications | |
| Specjbb | 2.4 GHz |
| MySQL | 2.33 GHz |
Considering that AMD prices this Opteron 2350 under the Xeon 5345, AMD has an attractive price/performance offering for most applications. The only exception is a chess engine and highly optimized Intel binaries. Although our testing is not finished yet, there is very little doubt that AMD's newest chip is very energy efficient. Add to that the fact that the AMD platform is not burdened with the extra power consumption of FB-DIMMs, and it is clear that the third generation of Opterons will lead in the performance/watt area for a few months. When you are looking for the highest performance however, Intel has still a solid advantage with it's 3 GHz Xeon x5365
The future looks very interesting with the 45nm Xeon Harpertown and a 2.5GHz AMD quad-core in the next quarter. AMD hasn't clearly hit a homerun this time, but at least they're playing in the same ballpark.
Again, if you're curious about how quad-core Opteron functions in more of a desktop capacity - as a preview of things to come with the launch of Phenom - don't miss our AMD Phenom Preview article. We tossed in a GeForce 8800 GTX and ran some gaming and general computing performance numbers. It's still a socket 1207 server motherboard, but we limited the comparison to Santa Rosa versus Barcelona Opteron performance in order to focus on the CPU and not on potential platform differences.
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Phynaz - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Isn't this intentionally crippling the system?JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
No. Just check what Intel and other companies do when they submit Specjbb scores for example. With HW prefetch on, you get about 10% lower scores.nj2112 - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Was HW prefetching off for all tests ?lplatypus - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I thought that 2x00 series CPUs only supported one coherent hypertransport link, so would this mean that the "Dual Link" feature involving two HT links would require 8300 series CPUs?mino - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, maybe the changed that and all links are active (to enable setups like this) and the CPU just refuses to comunicate more than one coherent hopa away..mino - Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - link
Well, maybe the changed that and all links are active (to enable setups like this) and the CPU just refuses to comunicate more than one coherent hopa away..MDme - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Let the games begin!Viditor - Thursday, September 13, 2007 - link
Are you going to be re-doing the review with the shipping version (stepping BA) anytime soon?I'm most curious to see if the improvement of 5%+ claims are true...
MDme - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
I think Barcelona will be a success in the server world. It's performance is around 20% faster than equivalently clocked xeons with the exception of certain programs like fritz and the linpack intel library where it is around 5-10% slower. But since it scales better than the xeon chips it should negate that and increase it's lead on others as core/sockets increase. add to that it's power efficiency tweaks and aggressive pricing, AMD will be able to hold off intel in the server world.....maybe.With 2.5Ghz Barceys coming up that would be equivalent to around 3-3+ Ghz xeons. So AMD was right that they need to get to 2.6 Ghz....AMD needs to ramp up clock to get the highest-end performance crown, but for now, their offering offers a nice balance of performance and power efficiency for the price.
Now time for the Phenom to get it's act together.
TA152H - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
The article should have mentioned the performance penalty Intel chips are suffering from with regards to FB-DIMMS. While it's true they should be benchmarked in servers with with memory, it's also widely rumored that they are going to be offering choices in the near future. This memory has a really big impact on a lot of benchmarks, so when looking towards the future, or desktop, it's important to keep in mind the importance of Intel using different memory. I don't think even Intel is stubborn enough to stick with this seriously slow, and power hungry memory. Maybe as a choice it's fine, but it must be clear to them that offering something else as well as FB-DIMMs is very desirable in the server space. Then again, look at how long they stuck with Rambus.