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."
Great (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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: (Score:2)
Re:FBDIMM (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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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.
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In such a case idle power becomes an issue. That is, of course, unless the desktops are busy doing their share of work for various botnets.
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We're three days from the AMD Barcelona launch (Score:1, Funny)
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My question is - is it a true fact.
"Commander Taco is really an onion wearing a Fedora doing that dance doing a jig on the top of the Vadicant" Is a fact, but certainly not a true fact.
Interestingly, AMD chips, to my experience, have been just as good as Intel. The problem has been motherboard chipsets. These are very rarely produced by AMD, and until nVidia came along and made them, did suck. As of nVidia producing them, AMD has been just as stable/reliable of a platform as Intel. A
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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 h
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Actually I patch about once a month on production web servers that face the Internet. Unless there is an IIS patch or something critical. Only port 80 and 443 face the Internet since my servers are firewalled so I can get away with extending my patch window. My DNS Windows based servers are the same way. The RPC vulnerability recently meant jack to me because I don't manage the servers directly over the Internet. I have a point to point connection which is totally private so most things you don't need to pa
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As opposed to an opinion, a statement that is only subjectively true or false. "AMD is the best CPU company ever."
The most common usage of "fact" is a statement that has been determined to be true, but the GP was using the other definition to make his point.
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I agree that this is a fact, but not a true fact, since truth be told dictionary.com is a good quick reference but an overall shitty dictionary. The wikipedia page for "fact" includes the definition as something which may be true or false, but the citation is for the print version of the Oxford English D
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Granted, Wikipedia (Oxford English Dictionary) tells that the meanings allegation or stipulation have a long history in English. It does not mean that it's really the case in contemporary every-day language.
And actually the Wikipedia (OED) example quote is: "the author's facts are not trustworthy". It would sound silly to say "author's facts are not facts" because it does not emphasize the point which is that the "facts
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Ive had Soyo and MSI boards last me literally weeks, while I still have an old KT series gigabyte trucking along just fine.
Its about the package, not just the processor.
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I'm pretty sure that for something to be called a 'fact' it has to have the property of being true.
I'm deeply disturbed that there are people out there who think that 'fact' can be used to describe something that isn't true.
words often have more than one definition (Score:1)
Only the first of these definitions points to a meaning where a `fact' is unequivocally and always true.
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I can't seem to find anywhere which defines "fact" as the latter definitions you mentioned. Google [google.com] doesn't think so anyway: all theirs seem to indicate 'truth' as a prerequisite (one of them says "possible to be evaluated as being true or false." and that's about as close to your definitions as I could get.
Those definitions were out of a dictionary (Score:1)
BULLSHIT (Score:2)
The FB-DIMMS are sucking up alot of power......... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Does it matter? (Score:1)
As the size of the farm scales, however, I'd hazard to guess that the p
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.
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Since ACs usually have COPs better than 9, the AC would use less than 25W to offset the heat generation of a 200W system. So the savings from not having the extra heat to pump out in the first place far outweighs (>8:1) the cooling costs themselves.
As far as datacenters and server/render/etc. farms are concerned though, lower-power and faster units only means they can pack more units per rack and more racks per r
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Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
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This is especially critical in older data centers. I know of one where they can't put more than a couple of blade enclosures in a rack because the DC wasn't designed to put that much power and cooling into one spot. Physical space is no longer the limitation.
Since there's always a d
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Overall, data center power consumption is a big deal. It's one of the main reasons that some corporations are after virtualization. It's one of the main reasons that Google is locating a datacenter in the Columbia Gorge.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/13/business/se arch.php [iht.com]
While you were 'hazarding to guess', and 'imagining' and thinking various th
She Cannot Be Fooled (Score:2)
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I think Intel has a reasonable beef with the test. I'm not an intel fanboy.. except that I think they have better stuff right now in the 2-socket (4 and possibly 8 core) arena.
Re:She Cannot Be Fooled (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that there is a very small performance difference in the 32bit world and a non-existent performance difference in the 64bit world. The Opteron actually outperforms quite commonly in the 64bit world much like the Athlons do against Core 2 Duo on the desktop side. Intel has an edge on 32bit optimization right now which is why the Core 2 Duo looks so good right now.
Add 4 and 8 sockets and you've got to be joking considering Intel's shared bus. They cores are chocked for memory throughput at that point while the Opterons just perform better and better as they scale. In a 2 socket system they compete very well. In a 4 socket system the Opteron is by far the superior choice both with power consumption and performance especially with 64bit database,email, and web servers.
Not true... (Score:2)
I agree though, AMD's architecture scales *much* better with socket count and memo
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I was talking specifically talking about the Opteron vs Xeon, not Athlon vs Core2. The database benches I had done clearly put the Opteron in the winning spot but Intel has had time to improve. I'm not saying either are bad choices at this point. There is clearly healthy competition now. My experience with 64bit Xeon performance was the initial EMT64 offerings. They are not impressive by any means. I was not aware there has been significant improvement in this area.
Of course that is we research every year
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Re:She Cannot Be Fooled (Score:4, Insightful)
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:She Cannot Be Fooled (Score:5, Funny)
They used to but now they time how long it takes to toast a marshmallow. Its useful because you can use the melted mallows as thermal paste. Its not as efficient as Arctic Silver 5 but I hear its better than the standard ceramic stuff.
There's something i just don't understand... (Score:3, Insightful)
What do AMD have in their design methodologies that Intel don't?
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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.
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The original K7/Athlon, (actually, even P3) was noticably better than the first generation P4, without cpu beer-goggles.
Later P4s managed to overtake the 32-Bit Athlons noticably, until the Athlon64 came out, which took the lead again.
It didn't hold that lead for long, because the Core2s seemed to be major ass-kickers.
During these timeframes, there were extended periods where one was on-par with the other, or they were too close to call. H
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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.
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Re:There's something i just don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
Digital Equipment Corp's Alpha engineers.
Sorry to beat a dead horse to a pulp but those that know still know.
Please explain (Score:2)
So how did AMD get the DEC Alpha engineers? As far as I know, the DEC Alpha guys are still within HP. Did I miss something?
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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
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>So how did AMD get the DEC Alpha engineers? As far as I know, the DEC Alpha guys are still within HP. Did I miss something?
Alpha team was spun off to Intel.
http://news.com.com/Intel+gets+more+key+Alpha+alum s/2100-1006_3-1023146.html [com.com]
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20024 [theinquirer.net]
How many people were working on Alpha EV7 are still working at Intel would be a valid quest
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From what I can recall, Intel fellow Bob Colwell mentioned the CPU designers could integrate ethernet onboard but they faced a fight from the ethernet chip group which have their own marketshare, budget and design group.
I suppose that as long as chipsets (Northbridges and Southbridges) make money for Intel, memory controllers will stay on the Northbridge and use more power than hav
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You just answered your own question
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
Hypertransport (Score:1)
Intel's version of hypertransport (Score:1, Informative)
YAY! (Score:3, Interesting)
London, the world financial centre has real problems with datacentre power supplies. Any new ones pretty much have to be built outside the M25. There's pressure on the ones inside to use less power.
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I have mod points and could just smack you into oblivion, but decided to post instead and let others do the smacking.
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I think it is just a PR ploy. (Score:2)
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I don't believe that MySQL or SuSE linux has a bias tow
NetBurst? (Score:2)
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No relation (Score:2)
Imagine... (Score:1)
Let's Talk About the Benchmark (Score:1)
link for SPEC power benchmark (Score:1)