EM64T Xeon vs. Athlon 64 under Linux (AMD64) 313
legrimpeur writes "Anandtech has a nice performance comparison under Linux (AMD64) between the recently introduced 3.6GHz EM64T Xeon processor and an Athlon 64 3500+. It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks. No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though." Update: 08/09 23:34 GMT by T : As the Inquirer reports, many Anandtech readers take issue with the comparison.
More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
For what it's worth, I read the article and the processors seemed pretty well matched except for some "synthetic" benchmarks. I don't know much about the synthetic benchmarks that they used, but I have found that synthetic benchmarks are almost always biased in Intel's favor. Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel accidentally or is there some kind of conspiracy going on here? You be the judge.
Finally, to try to balance out the article submitter's inflammatory comments about the Athlon being "trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks", here is a nice paragraph from the article summary:
"That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less. Also, keep in mind that the AMD processor is clocked 1400MHz slower than the 3.6GHz Xeon. With only a few exceptions, the 3.6GHz Xeon outperformed our Athlon 64 3500+, whether or not the cost and thermal issues between these two processors are justifiable."
Obviously they are not comparing processors which have price parity, so one could spin this either as "look at how slow the Athlon is", or "look at how much money you have to spend to get an Intel chip that is faster than an Athlon", depending upon your bias.
Why dissapointing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Opteron (Score:5, Insightful)
in other news (Score:2, Insightful)
for this comparison to be fair, Xeon should be compared to Opteron!
AMD vs Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
The newegg benchmark (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, Anandtech should just never compare widely available hardware with totally unavailable hardware. And what's with using a 512KB cache, second-rank Athlon64 to compare with Intel's flagship worstation processor? How 'bout the 1MB-equipped Athlon64 FX, or more appropriately an Opteron 150 (in stock at online retailers for $600-$650).
The Comparison is not really fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the other synthetic benchmarks also show slighly suspicious anomalies.
Plus were are the Nocoma 32bit benches? How are we supposed to see how performance improved in 64bit mode without comparison?
A good review would have pitched the 3.6Ghz nacoma vs an Opteron 150, would have tested both in 32 and 64 bit and tried to use some application benchmarks.
Not just picking some old scores out of the datadump to create a "shootout"
Intel vs. AMD, Linux vs. Microsoft, etc. (Score:1, Insightful)
Case in point: It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks.
Why exactly is this disappointing? I mean, Intel released a faster chip. It may be more expensive than AMD's offering, but it will: (a) foster more competition, and (b) offer you a product (if you have to buy a computer right now) which appears to be faster in synthetic benchmark tests (whatever significance that may mean to you).
This isn't "disappointing". It's capitalism.
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeroen
Hog wash (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the 64bit benchmarks? They really didn't do any comparision to 32bit, so you can't say for sure if Intel implementation is good or not. Get the Opteron in there, do the same benchmarks in 32 and 64 modes and see if there is a difference. Also throw say 5 gigs of memory in the machines, that will see how each proc handles addressing above the 4gig limit.
Re:Opteron (Score:5, Insightful)
Riots in the streets (Score:5, Insightful)
What about scientific code? (Score:2, Insightful)
AMD has been consistently good at scientific computing, but I haven't seen any performance specs for the 64-bit ones. Has anyone else?
Ed.
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel
Given the history of the industry, I would more suspect the reverse, that the processor is tweaked to the benchmark.
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, a $850 CPU beats a $350 one? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, a Corvette just smooooookkkked a Ford Taurus.
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just Intel and AMD fanboys, but anything with two (or more) highly-polarised camps. You see exactly the same thing with regard to Microsoft vs Linux, Closed vs Open Source, etc.
Were I being cynical, I'd say two things:
1) the editors have an agenda to push
2) the editors want to post flamebait articles in order to drive hits (and therefore ad impressions) up.
Hell, just last week there was a story about an autonomous plane, that mentioned in the summary here that it was running XP Embedded. What the hell does that have to do with the actual story?
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intel vs. AMD, Linux vs. Microsoft, etc. (Score:2, Insightful)
Two companies is not real competition. They cross-license technologies, time their releases, fix their prices.. They work together to gouge as much cash out of us as possible.
Why can I not find a decent CPU to build a terminal out of for less than 50 bucks? How much should a 1.5ghz celeron (or tbred/whatever) be worth? Not anywhere close to what we're paying.
The same thing with ATi/nVidia. Two players means they each get half the market. All the fanboy knobbery (no matter who you're a fanboy for) just builds free hype. So long as whenever anyone anywhere goes to buy a video card, the only names in his head are "ATi" and "nVidia", both companies are happy.
Coke and Pepsi did the same thing to the soft drink market. There were really no "cola wars". They colluded until they dominated and controlled the market. Did you know that vending machine companies will not sell a backlit machine for any non-coke or non-pepsi product?
Just like you all think there's a real option this election day. Yeah, I'm suck of bush, I'm voting for "the other guy". There's no choice, there's no competition.
In a competitive market, Intel or AMD could both be knocked out by a third party. nVidia could go bankrupt tomorrow, like 3DFX did. Bush and Kerry could be golfing together in January, while President Nader is being inaugerated.
This fanboy idiocy creates these situations. It's ridiculous. Quit being such a bunch of stupid douchebags. I don't want to hear whether Intel or AMD is 2% faster on paper today. Tell me about Transmeta, VIA, Cyrix.. Tell me about PPC platforms (that dont cost $3000 extra for a fancy yet unneeded brushed nickel case) Tell me about the companies that may one day offer me an ACTUAL CHOICE and quit licking the balls of your corporate masters.
Re:AMD vs Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
Everytime I here this I cringe. The human eye can most certainly distiguish beyond 30fps, especially when it comes to crisp computer graphics. Most people who believe that 30fps is the limit is because that is what film is usually the rate with which film is displayed. However, if you notice film, you often have blurring around the actual sharp image (including CGI movies). This is because they eye normally sees a slightly blurred image do to the way the chemical receptors are fired in the eye. Therefore they look more like you see in the world. However, computers are different in that they don't usually have this blur. Without the blur, a lot more frames are needed so that the eye blur occurs correctly rather then lots of little snap shots. I myself can tell the difference between a 60fps image and a 75 fps image. I can tell the difference all the way up to 110 fps where it gets hard. I've run into people though who had trouble with telling the difference between 30fps and 40fps. So a lot of it depends on the person. However, we shouldn't cripple everyone for some.
Re:indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair again, Xeons generally outperform Pentium 4s at the same clock speed, due to various things like more cache and hyperthreading (before Intel added it to the Pentium line). The Xeon is normally targetted for servers and high-end workstations.
Finally, at the end of the article, they promise to benchmark the Xeons against the Opterons.
Re:Intel wins, but give credit where it's due (Score:3, Insightful)
The second figure you quote is relevant. The first figure you quote is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's like getting excited because your Chevy V8 is only redlined at 5500 rpm, and if you could make it run at 8000 rpm it'd kick the ass of that Mazda rotary.
What matters in the end is how fast the computer in which the CPU is placed does what you want it to do, and how much the system costs (and possibly heat/fan noise and power consumption, if you care about that sort of thing). Everything else is just fanboy wankery.
Re:Opteron (Score:3, Insightful)
Reply from the author (Score:1, Insightful)
17 - Posted on Aug 9, 2004 at 5:32 AM by KristopherKubicki
The only reason we even put the 3500+ in there is cause we already had benchmarks for it.
Relax, its just a primer for future articles. A 3.6F is supposed to compare with a "3600+" rated Athlon 64 isnt it? Since we dont have a 3600+ the 3500+ should perform slightly lower? Isnt this what we expected? And for those of you who dont believe me, a 3.6GHz 1MB EM64T Nocona is *exactly* like a 3.6F.
I thougth the AMD chip did pretty damn good for costing $500 less!
Kristopher
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know the A64 is PRated as slightly slower than the Xeon, but that's not what I have a problem with. The A64 has 512K cache - something that gets it KILLED against the Xeon. The A64 is a mainstream desktop chip positioned against the Pentium 4 (5xx series), the Xeon (9xx series, IIRC) is a low-end server/workstation chip (mid-end being served by the Xeon MP and Oppie 8xx, high-end being served by the Itanic, SPARC, POWER, etc.) positioned against the Opteron 2xx.
Unfair review, IMO. Even an FX-53 (939 or 940) vs a single Xeon would have been fair, seeing as the FX-53 is an overclockable (and available in S939) Oppie 150...
Now, anyone want to give me a dual S940 mobo, a dual Xeon mobo, two Oppie 250s, two Xeon EM64T 3.6GHz chips, some RAM, some HDDs, and a 6800 Ultra, so I can test this out?
I call bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
The "math intensive" benchmark in this setup was Povray, and there the Athlon 64 shined. A lot. lame is also a floating point heavy application, and both CPUs are close there.
gzip measure memory performance. Apparently, the dictionary fit completely into the cache of the Xeon. Not a fair test.
I cannot comment on MySQL performance. It should measure integer and memory performance, I would wildly guess.
Bernstein's prime sieve is also integer arithmetic . If you have a prime with 100 million digits, the action is mostly in the CPU caches. Again, no fair test.
The unfairness of the benchmark setup becomes particularly obvious when you look at the chess benchmark. Chess (and other game AI type problems) do a lot of unpredictable jumps. That's the weak side of Pentium 4, and that's why Athlon 64 has historically outperformed Pentium 4s by a WIDE margin. Look at the hardware used by the PC chess tournaments and the chess grandmasters and you see Athlon and Athlon 64 all the time. If Anand now measures that Athlon 64 is outperformed by a Xeon, then the test setup can not have been fair.
I don't know about ubench, never heard of it before.
Password cracking and encryption is 100% integer arithmetic. And it is one of the mainstays of Opterons from the beginning. Anands measurement flies in the face of that.
I call bullshit.
Re:3.6GHz vs 2.2GHz (Score:3, Insightful)
Er, it's the cache, stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Very poor comparo.
Jonathan
Re:Hyperthreading (Score:4, Insightful)
So a lot of the synthetic benchmarks seem to be optimized for Intel's long pipeline.
Re:comparisons of Intel/AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
Do your own benchmarks. (Score:5, Insightful)
With the overwhelming majority of our real-world custom application performance numbers, the Opteron system was the better performer by a wide margin.
I'd suggest if anyone is making a real decision about these chips, to test them out yourself under actual-use conditions.
How much did Intel pay Anandtech? (Score:2, Insightful)
As almost any tech reviewer would have been aware of this, one can only wonder if some money changed hands, as this article seems to be intentionally slanted to make the Xeon look better then the Athlon 64. Also synthetic benchmarks in general tend to be very unreliable, and sometimes worthless, often slanted in design to favor one CPU or another, usually Intels, since they have the most money to throw around.
Re:More Slashdot Flamebait? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardly a fair comparison. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:3.6GHz vs 2.2GHz (Score:3, Insightful)
This always annoys me...
You see, you can't buy an AMD at 3.6 GHz because it wasn't designed to run that fast. The AMD does more work per clock so it CAN'T run at 3.6GHz in 90nm. It is simply not designed to do so. The laws of physics prevent this.
The Intel CPU CAN run at 3.6GHz because it was DESIGNED to run at 3.6GHz AT THE COST of doing LESS work per clock.
If I had a CPU that could execute 2 instructions per clock at 1 GHz and another CPU that could execute 1 instruction per clock at 2 GHz, they would have the exact same performance.
They are different design styles. Sometimes the high frequency, lower-IPC approach is better, sometimes the lower frequency, higher-IPC approach is better. You can see this in the discrepency in performance of 2 CPUs with vastly different design tradeoffs.