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AMD Upgrades Hardware

AMD Takes Opteron To 2.4GHz 258

Posted by timothy from the zhoooooommmm dept.
EconolineCrush writes "AMD has added a series of Opteron x50 processors to its workstation and server line that push the K8 core up to 2.4GHz. The Tech Report has tested the latest single and dual-processor Opterons against more than 20 other processors, including exotic Pentim 4 Extreme Edition chips, affordable Athlon 64s, and everything in between. Even if you have no interest in AMD's latest workstation chips, the review is worth checking out to see how two dozen of the fastest workstation and PC processors stack up in rendering, scientific computing, speech recognition, and even gaming tests."
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AMD Takes Opteron To 2.4GHz More

AMD Takes Opteron To 2.4GHz

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  • 2.4ghz? (Score:3, Funny)

    by p00p at instable.net ( 773687 ) <p00p@NOspam.instable.net> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @07:51AM (#9193980) Homepage
    So what is that, 4000+?

  • The Conclusion... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mz6 ( 741941 ) * on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @07:54AM (#9193988) Journal
    From the article to save everyone the 16 pages of boring charts and graphs.. Conclusions "If I were building (or, implausibly perhaps, buying) my ultimate workstation right now, I'd want a pair of Opteron 250s beating at the heart of it. The benchmarks speak volumes. For single-processor systems, the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet. In a multiprocessor configuration, the Opteron 250 scales up very well, even without the benefit of an optimal memory configuration, a NUMA-aware OS, or 64-bit extensions. By contrast, Intel's dual Xeons are a little bit disappointing. They perform relatively well in CPU-bound apps like 3D rendering programs, which are also largely well optimized for SSE2. But in memory-bound applications where dual Xeons ought to do well, like video encoding, the Xeons' slow bus and RAM hold them back. One has to wonder what Intel is hoping to accomplish by saddling its workstation-class processors with older, slower technology. Even a single Pentium 4 benefits greatly from additional bus and memory bandwidth. Surely a pair of Xeons on shared bus ought to have this same advantage. Intel's apparent willingness to forego such enhancements in favor of adding ever-larger on-chip caches to the Xeon is puzzling"

    • Re:The Conclusion... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @07:59AM (#9194013)
      From the article to save everyone the 16 pages of boring charts and graphs

      Thanks for the summary but can I just say I appreciate the level of detail and information provided. Way too many 'benchmarks' these days, especially those dealing with language performance are from some loser with their crappy home PC which they usually dont even know how to configure properly.

      Its a relief to see a benchmark from someone competent and aware of the various factors affecting the results obtained.

    • Re:The Conclusion... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ishark ( 245915 )
      Thanks for the summary. I quickly browsed the article looking at some graphs, and I'm suprised by the bad performance of the Athlon 64s compared to the Athlon XPs in many of the tests.... Is any of those programs running in 64 bit mode, or it's just a test of 32-bit applications running on 64-bit CPUS?

    • I don't think it is puzzling at all (Score:5, Interesting)

      by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:04AM (#9194029)
      Intel's apparent willingness to forego such enhancements in favor of adding ever-larger on-chip caches to the Xeon is puzzling"

      Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.

      It's not until recently that AMD has starting "schooling them" on what improvement really means. Just look at how Intel is going to use the AMD x86-64 method in the upcoming Intel 64bit platform. And now "If I were building (or, implausibly perhaps, buying) my ultimate workstation right now, I'd want a pair of Opteron 250s beating at the heart of it. The benchmarks speak volumes. For single-processor systems, the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet..." And this is at much lower mhz!

      I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings.

      -Pete

      • Re:I don't think it is puzzling at all (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Yartrebo ( 690383 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:33AM (#9194176)
        Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.

        It's might be easy, but it isn't cheap to add more cache. Cache accounts for something like 50% of the die surface of a modern chip, and a larger die means a lower yield and less chips per wafer.
      • The sentence before your quoted line there speaks volumes to the issue.

        Surely a pair of Xeons on shared bus ought to have this same advantage.

        It's way easier to ramp up the bus speed for a single processor, since it only has to interact with one other device. It's considerably harder to increase the speed when there are three devices on the bus instead of only two. Since the Opteron uses point to point connections they don't have this same problem. In that sense it's not really puzzling at all. They pro

      • Re:I don't think it is puzzling at all (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Vaystrem ( 761 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:54AM (#9195273)
        "Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work."

        You are forgetting a key deficiency of the P4 "netburst" architecture. Its incredibly long pipeline which makes it very susceptable to cache misses. Therefore the larger the L2 cache the less of a performance hit the processor will take if it misses an instruction or two.

        It is possible that adding a bigger cache is 'cheap' but if that were the case we'd see a dramatic reduction in the price of P4EEs as they are getting schooled by AMDs. L2 Cache is not cheap to implement. And significantly adds to the manufacturing cost of the processor.

        Additionally the lack of a FSB upgrade on the Xeons is troubling, but that apparantly is coming later this year, and this may reduce the advantage of the Opteron's to SOME degree. However, in the current architecture the Xeon's FSB bandwidth will always be shared - while the Opteron's get dedicated bandwidth for every processor. This is really the most remarkable advantage of 'Hammer' family of AMD CPUs over the Netburst generation of P4s/Xeons.

        "I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings."

        Intel put a lot of money and R&D into a product line (P4 NetBurst) and honestly - even with AMD making inroads - they still do not have that large a share of the CPU market. Intel has however observed their lead eroding and have canned Tejas - successor to the Prescott. So Intel is able to step up and make the big changes even when it has sacrificed large amounts of R&D money.

        Intel to formally confirm Tejas canned [theinquirer.net]
        Intel may have canned Tejas... [theinquirer.net]

        • I hate to sound like I'm being contrary, but I don't really know enough about the subject:

          You are forgetting a key deficiency of the P4 "netburst" architecture. Its incredibly long pipeline which makes it very susceptable to cache misses. Therefore the larger the L2 cache the less of a performance hit the processor will take if it misses an instruction or two.

          I just finished a Computer Architecture class at the local university. While I'll probably forget 90% of what we learned in that class in another
      • I respectfully disagree that Intel was ever competing with itself. They've been competing with AMD in the desktop/workgroup market for a long time now, and with Sparc/MIPS/Alpha in the enterprise market as well. Intel developed the high-clock rate Pentium 4 to compete directly with AMD's Athlon, after the Athlon whooped the Pentium 3. The Intel marketing people saw how much leverage AMD got from being the first to 1GHz with their Athlon and they didn't want that to happen again. Intel was *severely* embarr

    • Re:The Conclusion... (Score:3, Informative)

      by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
      BTW, the 150 is a top-locked AFX53 (or, the AFX53 is an unlocked 150). Also, EconolineCrush's comment about the K8 core just now hitting 2.4GHz is wrong - the FX53's been out about a month, I think.

    • Re:The Conclusion... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:24AM (#9194123) Homepage Journal
      The reason is that a three-drop bus used for Xeon DP (533MHz bus), five-drop for Xeon MP (400MHz bus), can't operate as fast signalling-wise as a point-to-point bus used for Pentium 4 and all Athlon systems, 1 and 2 processor. Terminmation was just too difficult, I think. Before Hypertransport, the wiring for multiprocessing with only a point-to-point bus was rediculously expensive, particularly on the chip that connects the CPUs to the rest of the system.

      AMD got a little unconventional and this time it paid off on Opteron. It didn't work so well with the Athlon MP because of this wiring problem, too many wires, too expensive of a core chip, it was 1000+ pins when 600 pins was thought to be expensive.

  • AMD are back (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RoderickMcDougall ( 661783 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @07:55AM (#9193994) Journal
    They were lagging there for a while but the benchmarks depict a good story. Looks like the opteron is going to be yet another AMD chip that is great for gaming (and most other things). Hopefully a cheaper price than the p4's will really contribute to yet another dominating year for AMD.

    • Re:AMD are back (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dealsites ( 746817 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:01AM (#9194021) Homepage
      I agree. AMD has some really great products. We always hear about Intel's huge R&D budget. I'm not sure how much of that is alloted to processor design, but it doesn't seem like they've been able to outrun AMD. AMD might not always have the fastest chips at any given moment, but they are always close behind. Since I don't buy bleeding edge equipment due to the high cost premiums, AMD is always a solid choice for me.

      --
      New deal processing engine online: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html [dealsites.net]
      • AMD processor design is run in conjunction with Sun and Apple and several other companies. Basically they have several sets of labs all trying diffrent things.

        Hence, hypertransport + On Chip Memory + efficient design all comming at once as opposed to intels slow and steady approach.

        $0.1768 (hey I live in Canada.)
        • And that has nothing to do with the fact they AMD hired most of the Alpha design team when DEC stopped do their chip development?

          • Re:AMD are back (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

            I think that's an awesome strategic move! AMD had the insight to see that hey, here's a group of highly technical people that have some great ideas, and gee, we can hire them all.

            Would rather have had AMD go "hmm, naaah, we don't need to hire guys with really creative and proven ideas, let's go reinvent the wheel"?

            Thanks to their insight, hypertransport did not go the way of the dung heap, and superior processors design resulting in better performance, especially in multi-processor machines have resulte

  • 2.4 Rates as around PR3900+ (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ænertia ( 96622 ) <aenertia.aenertia@net> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @07:59AM (#9194014) Homepage Journal
    I have been running my Opteron 248 at 2400Mhz. Sisoft seems to equate this to a PR rating of 3900+. I have no idea how it calculates this so please take that with a measure of salt.

  • Glad to see AMD coming to the party. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WordODD ( 706788 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:07AM (#9194047)
    I work for a medium sized school divison and this year happens to be the year when my school will get new equipment. When the meetings about what to buy have occured every single time someone has mentioned getting AMD chips instead of Intel those in managerial positions have been quick to say, " No, AMD chips are slow and run very hot. They wouldn't be a good choice for what we are looking for." Now this insight is coming from people who..

    A. Are mainly concerned about the bottom line as far as price goes.
    Which makes zero sense being AMD chips are more then competitivly priced compared to Intel.

    B. Are supposedly in the know about technology.
    Which is obviously not the case as many of them still think AMDs have the same cooling problems they did 5 years ago.
    These chips are cheaper now then their Intel conterparts and from my experience run at the same speed if not faster. AMD is finally getting on the ball as far as putting the clock speed measured in Ghz to provide direct comparission which really needed to be done in order to compete. Combined with their dedication to inovation, i.e. the 64 bit processor that Intel has still yet to bring to market make me really suppport what the company is trying to do. I really hope to see more reviews like this that I can pass on to those in charge in hopes of getting away from an Intel only environment.

    Just to clarify I do not hate Intel I just think that between the two there Intel does not always win outright and AMD should be considered before any purchases are ever made.

  • Compiling (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IceFox ( 18179 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:12AM (#9194074) Homepage
    Has anyone done any compiling tests? If so PLEASE share! -Benjamin Meyer

    • Re:Compiling (Score:4, Informative)

      by Illissius ( 694708 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @11:19AM (#9195510)
      AnandTech usually does them in their processor reviews, lemme dig one up.
      Here's [anandtech.com] one, for example.
      (Of note, the Athlon FX-51 and -53 are identical to Opteron 148 and 150 processors, respectively. The Athlon 64s are similar as well, difference is they use a different socket, have only single-channel memory controllers, and use unbuffered/unregistered memory.)

      Basically, the Hammers are godlike at compilation.
      The lowest-rated (at the time; a 2800+ has since been released) A64 3000+ beats the fastest P4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition.

  • Waste of time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:13AM (#9194080)
    Can somebody please benchmark a dual AMD opteron against a dual PPC 970 (MAC G5), using Linux in 64bit mode. What is with all these kids benchmarking opterons in 32bit mode?
    • I agree - not everyone who wants a computer at an ad agency wants a Mac and not everyone who owns a Mac wants/needs/can afford another.

      I wish all Intel/AMD chip benchmarks would include how they rate against the PowerPC.

    • Re:Waste of time... (Score:4, Informative)

      by ValourX ( 677178 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:30AM (#9194145) Homepage
      64-bit vs. 32 bit using FreeBSD [slashdot.org]

      Don't you ever read the BSD section?

      -Jem
    • I suspect that the real reason that this does not occur is because most review type sites are a) not using linux at all, b) cater to a specific audience and c) want to use all the same test suites and benchies that everyone else does, and therefore can't use linux.

      Personally, I think its a huge mistake. IF I had the money to start doing these types of reviews, that's exactly what I would do...use linux and bench against ppc as well as x86.

      The reason is that linux is multi-architectural, unlike windows, a

    • Re:Waste of time... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by phoxix ( 161744 )
      Can somebody please benchmark a dual AMD opteron against a dual PPC 970 (MAC G5)

      Not so fast, a significant problem in such a comparison is that gcc has *much* better support for x86-64 than it does for PPC64. If there was even a chance that a dual PPC970 machine was faster than a dual x86-64 machine, the likes of Yellow Dog [yellowdoglinux.com], and Momentum Computer [970eval.com] would have been all over it.

      Sunny Dubey

      • Not so fast, a significant problem in such a comparison is that gcc has *much* better support for x86-64 than it does for PPC64.

        Well, lots of reviews trashing ppc64 sounds like a good incentive for apple to help out the gcc project then. BTW, doesn't apple use gcc as the system compiler for OS X? In that case, you can't even dismiss gcc performance as only something those dirty GNU/hippies care about.
      • So use XLC on the 970 and the PathScale compiler on the Opteron.

    • Maple/Mathematica benchies while at it... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://smc.vnet.net/timings50.html is a start.

      Sad times when a

      Dell Precision 650, 4X3.06GHz Xeon, 512KB L2, 4GB, Win XP Pro V5.1 [35]:

      is slower than a

      Athlon 2800+, 512 KB cache, 333 MHz FSB, Win XP Pro

  • A word of caution (Score:5, Informative)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:17AM (#9194093) Journal
    I had an AMD64 chip with the heat spreader.

    I went to take the heat sink off the other day, and the vacuum that formed between the heat spreader and heat sink caused the chip to get yanked right out of the closed ZIF socket when I tried to get the heat sink off.

    Then, after reinstalling the chip, apparently the heat spreader has become disconnected from the core internally, because the CMOS reports rising temperature up to 120C, but even the heat spreader isn't warm if I turn the system off and get the heat sink off again.

    So be very careful. It takes about 10 minutes to take the heat sink off the heat spreader if you used a coating of grease that covers the whole top of the chip, even if you used a thin coat. You have to wiggle the heat sink and gently pull up for quite a while before that vacuum is broken. It doesn't help that the heat sink design makes it impossible to see the chip or slide the heat sink to the side.

    And be aware that it doesn't take a whole lot of force to yank the chip right from the ZIF, possibly damaging things in the process.

    • Re:A word of caution (Score:5, Informative)

      by MoronGames ( 632186 ) <cam@henlin.gmail@com> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:08AM (#9194485) Journal
      The problem is that you're using too much thermal compound. Generally, you use no more than an amount the size of a grain of rice, and spread it out to cover the entire heatspreader, and the bottom of the heatsink. Not only will this give a lower chance of damaging something, but it will also get better heat transfer and drop your temperatures.

    • This is why you never take the heatsink off while the CPU is still in your motherboard... I thought everyone knew that?

  • AMD's Cool 'n Quiet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:20AM (#9194108)
    ...the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet.

    I know I might be nitpicking here, but I really wish the Opteron series of chips incorporated AMD's Cool 'n Quite technology.
    From what I read on their website, with a supporting motherboard and driver (2.6.5 has a native driver) the Athlon 64 can scale down to 800Mhz, cool enough for the system to shut the HSF and case fans completely offoff.

    One demo I saw online had a Athlon 64 SFF computer playing a DVD while the AMD cool 'n quite app was shoing the the CPU at 80hz and the system was totally silent.

    Coudn't server rooms benfit from the reduced electricuty bill also?

  • Great, but how fast can they compile the kernel? (Score:4, Funny)

    by freelunch ( 258011 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:27AM (#9194133)
    Nice article, but we need more Linux-centric bench and test sites.

  • Hmm.. Pushing the top end... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Forge ( 2456 ) <kevinforge AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @08:30AM (#9194147) Homepage Journal
    .. means cheaper CPUs at the bottom end.

    My needs are simple, Most of my systems would do just fine with a Duron 800MHz or even slower CPUs. With the advent of new high end chips heralds lower prices at the low end.

    It's gotten to the point where only a few popular niches need to even bother with anything but the absolute bottom end chips. I.e. Gaming, video encoding and servers (Faster chips mean more users on a server).

    Scientific Computing clusters, Compiling lots of code everyday etc.. are other niches worth noteing. For Web browsing, Office productivity, educational apps and old games I advise you to buy the chip so far behind the curve it won't be available in a few weeks.
    • That's generally true, although with things like RAM that's totally not the case - PC133 ram is stupidly expensive for its slow and outdated performance - it still costs $50 for a 128mb DIMM [bestbuy.com]. The same amount DDR ram is actually cheaper [bestbuy.com]!

      I realize it's partly due to the fact that far fewer companies manufacture the older RAM, but either way, paying high prices for outdated hardware seems kind of odd if you ask me...

      Getting back to your original topic, another good thing about new CPUs getting faster is the
  • Here at the physics lab we are doing research about neural networks. This involves simulations that require a lot of memory and cpu-cycles. A problem we have encountered numerous times when building phase-diagrams is that the mathematical routines chrash when we reach critical parametervalues. This is caused by the fact that certain matrices become 'singular'. This problem does not arise however when we use 'double long' formats, or 64-bit floats, because these are way more precise and still can go a long w
    • Best bang for (euro)buck? For 10K you can probably build a 4 way Opteron system w/ 8 GB of RAM, especially if you are getting any kind of educational discount. I would definitely suggest Opteron, as from experience w/ vendors, they seem to be priced about the same as Xeons ( which are the current cheapest ), and do 64 bit and are also a bit faster for some apps. I would probably look at a 2-way Opteron system w/ 8GB of main memory, and then after that begin looking at either a 2nd workstation/server, or

    • Re:Question about itanium2 - Opteron (Score:5, Informative)

      by mjuarez ( 12463 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @11:10AM (#9195432)
      The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.

      Itanium servers are out of your league. A decent 1.5Ghz Itanium chip with 3Mb of on-die cache will set you back around $3,000. Not including memory, hard disks, etc. Just for ONE chip.

      Xeon are way cheaper, but in most cases are more expensive than Opterons, do not scale very well when used in 2-way or higher configurations, and can only use 4Gb in flat mode. To access above 4Gb, you need to use PAE, which greatly hampers the performance (PAE is akin to the "high-memory" window trick they used back in the DOS days).

      Opterons, on the other hand, are usually cheaper than Xeons, much cheaper than Itanium, almost always have better performance that Xeons, scale much better (in fact, a 2-way server performs better than a 1-way times 2!) and are only beat by Itanium in floating point performance, and then only barely.

      There's another thing. Opterons are going to become dual-core in less than 2 years, with the same pinout as today. That means that if you have a lowly 2-way server that you're thinking about dumping, you can buy new dual-core Opterons and instantly get a 4-way out of your old 2-way server. Also, Opterons can access linearly up to 1Tb of physical RAM (that's 1,024 Gb), and up to 256Tb of virtual memory. And, finally, it's the only 64-bit processor you can get today that works with all your 32-bit x86 software. Finally, Opterons consume less energy than equivalent Xeons or Itaniums, and this becomes very important when thinking about A/C, UPS, standby power generators, etc.

      I'd recommend you go with Opteron. Check out some well known tier-2 vendors such as Angstrom, Appro or Verari. They all make excellent quality Opteron servers and workstations. If you want brand names (and are willing to pay for it), check out Sun, Hewlett Packard or IBM for 2-way servers, or HP for a 4-way. IBM even has a dual Opteron workstation, if that's what you want.

      Good Luck,

      Marcos

      • Re:Question about itanium2 - Opteron (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @12:36PM (#9196196) Homepage
        1. There's another thing. Opterons are going to become dual-core in less than 2 years, with the same pinout as today. That means that if you have a lowly 2-way server that you're thinking about dumping, you can buy new dual-core Opterons and instantly get a 4-way out of your old 2-way server.

        Even if the pinouts stay the same, the system boards you can buy now might not support the processors being sold in 2 years.

        Why upgrade the CPU only in 2 years and skip the other improvements available at that time?

        I have very infrequently had a CPU upgrade that was worth it, while updating other components (disk, network, added RAM, video, ...) usually do give a reasonable boost. Most of the time the modest real performance increase from swapping in a new CPU -- one that is bound to the limits of the existing system board-bound -- isn't worth the time or money.

        The only exception I can think of is if you buy behind the bleeding edge and upgrade every 6-9 months to a processor that is substantially better (2x) but not bleading edge.

        To do this properly usually requires getting an advanced system board that can handle the higher end components and then turning around and being cheap on the CPU. While this can be a good idea, it usually isn't and the situation is very specific to the system board.

        1. IMNSHO:
        2. Always buy what you need today and do not look over 6-9 months in the future for upgrades.

        If you expect a payoff in a future upgrade, make sure that the hardware you buy now is also what you need today and do not depend on a future promise. If it works out, HOO-RA! If not, you haven't lost a thing.

    • Re:Question about itanium2 - Opteron (Score:5, Informative)

      by joib ( 70841 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @11:45AM (#9195745)

      This problem does not arise however when we use 'double long' formats, or 64-bit floats, because these are way more precise and still can go a long way when 32-bit doubles already jump to zero, thus causing the problems.

      On the x86 architecture, "long double" is 80-bit, and not 64-bit, which is plain "double". "float" is 32-bit.

      However, note that the x86 does all floating point operations with 80-bit precision. So you don't get any performance advantage from using only single precision variables (other than lower memory bandwidth usage). Thus, a good rule of thumb is to always use double (long double might be better but isn't portable, and SSE doesn't support it if you want to use that). Single precision is mainly useful when you want to store large amounts of data (remember to cast the part of the data you're working on to double before calculating).

      As others have pointed out, currently the Opteron is quite unbeatable in price/performance. 10000 EUR should certainly get you a 2 cpu system. Probably not 4 cpu:s though? Given that you need lots of memory, especially avoid the Xeon (or some other 32-bit architecture). Linux can only give 3 GB to one process with it's default configuration (I guess windows is similar?). With the so-called 4g/4g patch you can allow 4 GB for each process, but the price is lower performance. With a 64-bit architecture all those problems disappear.
    • Have you thought about getting a mathematician/numerical analyst (e.g. grad student) to take a look at your system? Brute forcing singular matrices usually doesn't scale well. Being able to identify the critical points would probably give you more bang for your euro.

  • 64bit AMD only benched with 32bit OS and software? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stock ( 129999 ) <stock@stokkie.net> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:46AM (#9194769) Homepage
    One shouldn't compare apple with pears. So a shootout between 32bit only Xeon's and 64bit AMD's (ok which do 32bit) is a weird exercise. The testers only ran a 32bit version of Windows XP. That should be obvious. Still the Opteron 150 and 250 seem to win many shooutouts.

    Robert
    For real 64bit performance visit VooDoo software tuning [nvidia.com] and download the 64bit 2004 Longsword Gamez Demo [unrealtournament.com]. The Download of UT2004 64-bit English Linux Demo [xs4all.nl] is around 200Mb.

  • But the price... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dezer ( 545178 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:27AM (#9195068)
    Has anyone actually checked on the price? Take a gander over at http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_609,00.html?redir=CPT301 The new 150/250/850 models are $637/$851/$1514 comparatively. Compare that to the *48 models, which are still expensive. Does AMDs increased market share herald a a new strategy from AMD? Back "in the day" we all used to love AMDs more than Intels because of the great performance/cost ratio. I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous. I miss the old AMD...

    • I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous.

      Well, there are a couple of factors to consider. First, AMD is the only company right now that offers 64-bit x86. Second, the price is going to be pretty high since these were just released. Models that are a couple of notches down from top-of-the-line are better values. Third, these are server chips, so you should probably be wondering when dual processor Athlon64's will be coming out.

    • Re:But the price... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Illissius ( 694708 )
      The Opteron 1xx-s cost very nearly the same as an Athlon 64 of the same speed (which in turn cost the same as a Pentium 4 with MHz equal to the A64's rating), so those are fairly priced. The 2xx-s naturally cost somewhat more, while the 8xx-s cost a /lot/ more, which is reasonable seeing as only enterprise customers would think of wanting them, and iirc they're still a lot cheaper than Xeon MPs.
    • Well, these are not meant for you. Opteron is first and foremost a workstation/server CPU, it's obviously marketed and priced for companies.

      The regular A64 is much better bang for the buck, quite competive with P4. Not to mention the "old" Athlon XP's still here and still beats the living daylights of any other CPU on price/performance ratio.
    • Opterons are designed to be a server/high end work station chip. You need to comapare its price with like typed chips like the Xeon and SPARC from SUN.

      I've worked in the rendering graphics world where dropping $15k on an SGI, SUN, or ALPHA workstation in the past was nothing. The renderfarm alone was $3.2M of ALPHA servers back in the day.

      Funny thing now is it was replaced last summer with $750k worth of IBM blade servers that nearly quadrupled the number of processors in half the space.

      Anyway, AMD

  • The board they used only had memory off of one of the CPU's in the dual Opteron systems. I wonder how much this effected performance in the compute intensive benchmarks, or even memory bandwidth benchmarks.

    A benchmark with a Quad Opteron, like the Tyan Thunder K8QS [tyan.com] would be interesting. It has memory hanging off of each of the four CPU's. (Which opens a lot of questions about how that memory is managed.. Is there some sort of memory affinity per processor? What is the performance hit if one CPU needs

    • Which opens a lot of questions about how that memory is managed.. Is there some sort of memory affinity per processor?

      It's called a NUMA. Google for the term and ye shall find.

      The memory manager of the kernel has to take NUMA into account, or performance will suck.
      • But, it's not a typical NUMA architecture, is it?

        I think of NUMA more like the BBN Butterfly I worked on in college, where many CPU boards are connected by a relatively slow bus, and each CPU board has its own locally addressed memory. So, each CPU is a node, and for any decent performance it must use its own local memory.

        In the Opteron case, the memory is still relatively local, and based on the benchmarks in the article the performance hit for accessing another CPU's memory is not huge. In general, I

        • But, it's not a typical NUMA architecture, is it?

          I'm no expert on this, but I guess you're right.


          In the Opteron case, the memory is still relatively local, and based on the benchmarks in the article the performance hit for accessing another CPU's memory is not huge.

          Remember that the Opteron has an on-chip memory manager (MMU). Consider a system with two cpus, CPU#0 and CPU#1. The architecture, AFAIK, is that each CPU has one HyperTransport link to its own memory, and another HyperTransport link to
          • "CPU#0 -> MMU#0 -> HyperTransport -> Memory"

            Not quite.

            MC = Memory Controller

            Think CPU0 > FSB0 > MC0 > DDR

            This is the same path as any system with a northbridge, except that the FSB runs at the same clock as the CPU, and is physically much shorter.

            Connecting to another CPU is as follows:

            MC = Memory/HyperTransport Controller
            HT = HyperTransport

            CPU0 > FSB0 > MC0 > HT > MC1 > DDR

            Not as low-latency as a typical northbridge arrangement, but not bad.

            Remember that memory ban

  • Power, Heat, Noise (Score:3, Informative)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:55AM (#9195284)
    I wish reviewers would start including a section on how much power the systems take. I'd like to replace my home server box and would like to minimze power consumption since it runs 24/7. I'd also like to replace my 'desktop' PC and would like to minimize fans because I like to listen to music on it.

    • Re:Power, Heat, Noise (Score:3, Informative)

      by alienw ( 585907 )
      I have a much lower-end Opteron 140 in my box, and for all I know, it runs about 50% cooler than a comparable Athlon XP. I wouldn't worry too much about cooling them, just don't go for the super-high-end stuff. If you are looking for low power consumption, get the slowest chip that's made with the smallest process size.
    • Here's the lowdown: Athlon 64s and Pentium 4 C (Northwood) processors are comparable in power consumption (or heat dissipation? one of the two, but they are rather closely related), around 80-90W iirc. The newer Pentium 4 E (Prescott) processors consume rather more, over 100W. So there's that.

  • Quad Opterons? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ele7ven ( 781210 )
    Seldom do you get to see the performance of quad opterons in benchmarks. With amd's hypertransport technology, the 800 series decimates even the newest 4mb L3 cache xeons. Perhaps, however, it's that reviewers realize they don't need to show the complete scaling potential of the opteron to make the point that it's a superior workstation cpu.

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