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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JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
well said. I don't think AMD will have that advantage for a long time in 2P space :-)JackPack - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
The problem is, 45nm Harpertown and 1600 MHz FSB will be rolling in soon.Barcelona would have looked great 6 or 9 months ago. But today, it's a little weak unless they can raise the frequency fast.
Viditor - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
True, but so will HT 3.0 and the newer mem controller for the Barcelonas...
jones377 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
You got your work cut out for you now :)IntelUser2000 - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
AMD won't compete against Intel's Tulsa chips anymore. They will have to compete against Tigerton Xeon MP and the newly introduced Clarksbro chipset.On the DP server platform, Intel will introduce Harpertown and Seaburg chipset. Seaburg chipset features 1600MHz bus with significantly improved memory controller performance. We'll see how it all turns out but as of now, Barcelona is a bit late to be competitive.
wegra - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
You should not forget the Penryn. 2.5Ghz Barcelona will face to 3.1+Ghz Penryn. According to result from this article, I expect the performance of 2.5Ghz Barcelona will reach between 2.8 ~ 2.9Ghz Penryn. So wait till (hopefully) next year to see that AMD becomes the performance king. BTW, talking about the multi-processor servers, AMD will lead w/o much difficulties, I expect, thanks to the scalable architecture.