Server Benchmarking Lone Wolf Bites Intel Again 90
Ian Lamont writes "Neal Nelson, the engineer who conducts independent server benchmarking, has nipped Intel again by reporting that AMD's Opteron chips 'delivered better power efficiency' than Xeon processors. Intel has discounted the findings, claiming that Nelson's methodology 'ignores performance,' but the company may not be able to ignore Nelson for much longer: the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit company that develops computing benchmarks, is expected to publish a new test suite for comparing server efficiency that Nelson believes will be similar to his own benchmarks that measure server power usage directly from the wall plug."
FBDIMM (Score:3, Informative)
AMD also typically has lower idle clock multipliers so when they're not doing anything, they draw less power. If you have a room full of computers sitting there doing nothing, you'll certainly use less power in that case.
Power usage means heat. (Score:4, Informative)
And cooling requires electricity also. So by reducing the power usage of one component, you can save money on your cooling costs, also. It's twice the savings.
Re:FBDIMM (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, AMD also announced plans for off-chip AMB2-like memory bridges with multiple multi-gigabit serial lanes... they called it G3MX: G3 (socket) Memory eXtender.
So, while FBDIMMs may be going away soon, the idea of using external bridges to dump the RAM further away from the CPUs/chipset using serial interfaces is gaining traction - at least in the server space.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why all the hate for Intel? (Score:3, Informative)
All of my Opteron based servers are rock solid with multiple chipset vendors. The days when that was a problem for AMD are long gone. There is a reason I have to reboot my Xeon servers once a week and my Opteron servers stay up until my maintenance window. They are both configured identically but the Xeons just aren't as stable. I haven't been able to play with the newer Xeons, only the crappy P4 based ones. I've got some new servers coming though so I'll get an update on the stability issue.
Through the history of the Opteron though stability has never been an issue in my experience. The Athlon had problems as you were describing. There were plenty of Intel and AMD desktop chipsets that were horrible during that time. More of a chipset maker problem than a CPU maker. In both cases Intel and AMD had their own chipset out which did work. Although Intel motherboards declined sharply in quality around that time too. I remember having a bunch of xeons that would reboot and if you were lucky everything would come up okay. Firmware updates came out which gradually improved the issue. I do believe it took three firmware updates to get stability to what you would expect for a 24/7 server. Wasn't a problem with the CPU though.
Re:There's something i just don't understand... (Score:4, Informative)
There are definite differences in performance between the various CPUs. A mere 5% difference in power draw across a day times 1000s of CPUs is significant. Same with a 5% thermal dissipation difference, as that turns into increased cooling requirements.
These things all matter in the server world.
Intel's version of hypertransport (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Please explain (Score:1, Informative)
This has nothing to do with Intel's "chips" (Score:2, Informative)
To be more specific, the Xeon processor in this review is the same processor core as the Merom/Conroe Core 2 Duo core. If you benchmark Conroe on a platform using the same memory technology (DDR2) as AMD, you'll find that Intel's power consumption is significantly less than AMD's. But Intel decided to use a different technology (FBDIMM) for its server platforms, in order to increase maximum memory capacity, whereas the Opteron used a simpler technology which is severely limited in memory capacity per channel, since the outdated parallel multidrop DDR2 bus can't go at speed when heavily loaded.
FBDIMM is like PCI-Express or Hypertransport for a memory interface, meaning that it's serial and point to point, instead of parallel and multidrop. This allows Intel to add many more loads to the memory channel without slowing the channel down, because it is Fully Buffered (the FB part of FBDIMM), which increases memory capacity per channel. However, FBDIMM also turns out to be very power hungry, and Intel is now being forced (by benchmarks such as this one) to release server platforms without FBDIMM in order to lower power consumption for people who don't need large memory capacities. (for some confirmation of this, look here: http://theinquirer.net/?article=42183 [theinquirer.net])
In any case, the results of this benchmark aren't about "chips", they're about platforms. Intel's current chips are pretty good, but their server platforms need some work. That's why Intel's coming out with a whole new platform next year (here's some reading material for you: http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082 807020032 [realworldtech.com] ).
So a quick answer to your question: Intel's chips ARE better than AMD's, but their platforms aren't. Here's the question you should have asked: Why are Intel's platforms always behind AMDs? The answer to that is basically that Intel has lots more internal politics, and therefore it is slow to change things that have impact across the company, like platforms. Intel has a lot of internal competition: lots of separate groups working on various competing processors, so the processors themselves are usually pretty good (Darwin at work). But the teams making the processors don't have the freedom to change the platform, since that's outside their scope and requires lots of corporate maneuvering. So Intel's platforms are much slower to change than AMDs.
Summing up: don't confuse a system benchmark for a processor benchmark! TFA isn't about processors at all, it's about systems.