The Best Server CPUs part 2: the Intel "Nehalem" Xeon X5570
by Johan De Gelas on March 30, 2009 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
HPC Market
Contrary to virtualization, web servers, and databases, we have little expertise in our lab to perform and fully understand HPC benchmarks. Nevertheless, we can get an impression from AMD's and Intel's own benchmarking. There are two kinds of HPC applications: those that are completely CPU processing limited (dense matrices) and those that are mostly bandwidth limited (sparse matrices). A good example of the first type is LINPACK. We still have to verify our testing but the first results show about a 15% advantage for Intel. The intensity of the LINPACK benchmark does not allow turbo mode to kick in. LINPACK shows that when it comes to raw FPU performance, the newest Intel is only a few percent faster clock for clock than its competitor.
The second type of HPC applications is far more common. We have found a few LSDyna (crash simulation) numbers.
The Xeon X5570 business applications were fantastic, and the HPC applications are no exception. The newest Xeon is no less than 101% (!) faster than the previous generation of Xeons and almost 60% faster than the best Opteron.
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usamaah - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Is it me or is page 2 of this article missing some information? The title of that 2nd page is "What Intel and AMD are Offering," but in the body of the text there are only descriptions of Intel's Xeon chips? Perhaps a new title to reflect the body, or add AMD info?JohanAnandtech - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
I moved the AMD vs Intel pricing data to the back of the article as the pricing info is more interesting once you have seen the results. But forgot to change the title.. fixed. Thanks.usamaah - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Cool, thank you. Next time I'll finish reading the article before I make a comment, sorry ;-) Anyway wonderful article.Ipatinga - Monday, March 30, 2009 - link
Very nice to see a comparison over some generations of Xeon platform, including the new one (yet to be released).I would like to see a new article with Core i7 vs Xeon 5500... to check out if my Core i7 @ 3,7GHz is good enough in Maya 2009 (Windows XP 64bit, 12GB DDR3), or if a Xeon 5500 (each at 2,4GHz, for instance) in dual processor configuration will be a much better buy.