Server Benchmarking Lone Wolf Bites Intel Again

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."

Great

[Constantine XVI]

Now if they can get their laptop chips to be more efficient than Intel's, I'll be happy again.

The FB-DIMMS are sucking up alot of power.........

[Joe The Dragon]

The FB-DIMMS are sucking up alot of power and giving off a lot of heat. That is bad for intel as there chipsets use alot more power as well and that looks bad next to a AMD system with cheaper DDR2 ECC ram.

Intel new 4p systems with 4 FSB, L3 cache in the chipset and FB-DIMM may even use a lot more.

Amd systems can have more then one chip set link and more pci-e lanes as well.

There's something i just don't understand...

[Spy der Mann]

If intel chips are constantly exposed as being inferior to AMD's, why can't intel improve its engineering, with all that money flowing to them?

What do AMD have in their design methodologies that Intel don't?

Re:There's something i just don't understand...

[geekoid]

Your premise is flawed. They are not constantly exposed as being inferior to AMD. People supporting their biases constantly expose AMD or Intel.

In fact, both are so close that only very specifically myopic tests makes one the 'leader'. There is no noticeable performance difference between the two that matters.

Re:FBDIMM

[visualight]

If you have a room full of computers sitting there doing nothing, you'll certainly use less power in that case.

That is what most servers spend most of their time doing - nothing. There's peaks and valleys sure but there are *a lot* of idle cycles.

Re:She Cannot Be Fooled

[bockelboy]

These tests *did* factor performance into this (well, that's what the tester says. Intel is contesting this claim. You decided who you believe). In fact, those tests draw the same conclusions as folks I know who recently bought Opteron servers.

The Intel chips have great performance per watt *as a chip*. Perhaps even better than AMD does; I've never measured a chip's power usage.

The Intel servers, on the other hand, have worse performance per watt *as a fully loaded server*. Unless you're running the chip without a server, you generally should care about the power draw from the outlet - like these tests did.

The Intel servers seem to have the edge in performance per watt when the server is going nearly unused. However, in my area, usually the CPU is pegged 24/7 (unlike, say, a webserver).

It's good to see the chip wars are still alive and kicking. When the competition is healthy, consumers benefit instead of stockholders.

Re:More Slashvertising for IDG!

[6Yankee]

Are you going to paste this comment onto every post from one of these individuals? Despite the fact that you keep getting modded down for it? You must be really obsessed or really, really dense. Give it a rest already - or at least say something new.

I have mod points and could just smack you into oblivion, but decided to post instead and let others do the smacking.

Re:FBDIMM

[RingDev]

And the percent of Netadmins who have the time, budget, knowledge, and inclination to do so is right about .001%

I agree that Virtualization is a great solution, but the vast majority of IT shops around the world don't have the knowledge or budget to pull it off these days. Give it another 5-10 years and it'll be the new standard, but right now it just doesn't have the market or education penetration. For the cost of investing in a Xen system and training, most IT shops will be financially better off just paying the extra electric bill.

-Rick

Re:Please explain

[VENONA]

"AMD's culture of minimal R&D/innovation."

What? Who brought 64-bit instructions to x86, when Intel and HP were trying to drive everyone to high-dollar (and at the time miserably performing) Itanium for 64-bit? Who brought out an architecture that would let you plug FPGAs, etc., into CPU slots?

IMHO, AMD is lagging in semiconductor manufacturing processes. Their geometries are larger, etc. I doubt that they get the yields that Intel does, and that counts against them in price wars. But developing new fab processes costs a lot of money, and Intel has always had a huge financial edge. There's no conceivable way that AMD isn't doing there best with the resources they have available on this front, as it has a direct impact on the bottom line. Hence their history of fabrication R&D agreements with IBM.

BTW, I've worked for both companies (but some years ago) and did process engineering work for Intel. I have at least some clue, which is more than the A/C parent poster has.

"AMD's culture of minimal R&D/innovation" is completely unjustified bullshit.

Re:Not true...

[ShapeGSX]

The latest Xeons are all Core 2 derived parts. Your comparison is horribly dated.