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AMD Intel Hardware

Opteron Benchmarked Against Xeon 332

Posted by CmdrTaco from the round-64 dept.
jbmnuke writes "Tom's Hardware has posted a review of AMD's Opteron v. Intels Xeon." Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right? Update: 04/22 12:35 GMT by H : And there's the official benchmarks as well, with more coming - like Linux Magazine and Newsforge
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Opteron Benchmarked Against Xeon More

Opteron Benchmarked Against Xeon

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  • Bleh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by matttastic ( 613925 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:10AM (#5779981)
    It doesn't get my blood pumping, I can't afford such things (or cool them)! *Pats Duron 1000*

    • Re:Bleh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by madmarcel ( 610409 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:28AM (#5780072)
      Neither can I :( <<pats crusty old Celeron 466>>

      But but but...given time, these things will be common as muck and we'll all have at least one.

      <nostalgia>
      Ah, I remember when 386's and 486's where top-notch stuff and hideously expensive..
      </nostalgia>

      NOW...I have a whole attic full of %^$#@#!* 286's, 386's and 486's and I wouldn't know what to do with them :o

      I have a dream...that one day I'll have an attic full of 'old' opterons and xeons....and I won't know what to do with them ;P

      • Re:Bleh! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Nighttime ( 231023 )
        NOW...I have a whole attic full of %^$#@#!* 286's, 386's and 486's and I wouldn't know what to do with them :o

        C'mon, this is /. Imagine a beowulf cluster of ... :)

      • Ah, I remember when 386's and 486's where top-notch stuff and hideously expensive..

        I have a 486/100 (with 16mb 30-pin simms, w00t!) doing a great job as a firewall [ipcop.org] for my home network. I also have a p233 that'll be a mail & ldap server as soon as I get around to dropping a drive in it.

        Basically, old computers and switches and nics and stuff are so cheap now you can really learn a lot about tcp/ip networking for next to no money. I think I have less than $100 invested in my home network, most of whi

        • Re:Bleh! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Dun Malg ( 230075 )
          I think I have less than $100 invested in my home network

          I always laughed about hom much my friends spent on their setups a couple years ago. With the exception of my Athlon 850 box, my ENTIRE SETUP (4-6 boxes + 100Mbps BayStack switch + CAT5 patch panel + cabling) was put together using stuff other people were throwing away. Most of my stuff was literally pulled out of dumpsters. Last year, though, I did a few quick calculations and found out that I was spending about $600 a year on electricity for all t

          • Last year, though, I did a few quick calculations and found out that I was spending about $600 a year on electricity for all those old power hogs. So much for "free computers", eh?

            That's why we need to switch to cheap relatively non-polluting nuclear power [ornl.gov].

    • Re:Bleh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by byolinux ( 535260 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:33AM (#5780096) Journal
      Duron 1000 would make such a good name for an evil droid.

    • Re:Bleh! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:28AM (#5780388) Homepage Journal
      That Duron is pumping 45w of heat....

      Opteron is putting out 41w

      Xeon 3.06 is putting out 81.9w

      And the real beauty is, an XP 2400 cost $94 because of the opteron price war.

      Reaganomics lives in tech land.

      All the good stuff trickles down to us eventually.

    • Re:Bleh! (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:43AM (#5780455) Journal
      "Pats Duron 1000".

      Free advice: do not pat more recent microprocessors with remaining hand ;).

    • Re:Bleh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:20AM (#5780741)
      It doesn't get my blood pumping, I can't afford such things (or cool them)!

      1. Open up case
      2. Point 12" desk fan at CPU, turn on full blast
      3. Duck, as dust is blown out of case

      Desk fans: Keep CPUs cool and cases dust-free.

      • Re:Bleh! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bombcar ( 16057 ) <racbmob&bombcar,com> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:13AM (#5781195) Homepage Journal
        Use a paintball gun (with no paintballs, of course!) Works great.
        • Use a paintball gun (with no paintballs, of course!) Works great.

          I was modded as 'Funny', but I'm totally serious. We do it at the office and it works great.
        • Just use an air-compressor. I've got a nice 25 gallon air-compressor from HomeDepot. I run the hose through a cooler (so the air comes out really cold). A few seconds of cold air at better then 90 PSI is a great way to cool the CPU. I've often thought of rigging up a "drip system" that would hit the CPU with a blast for like 20 sec ever min or two. :)

  • Well, that and... (Score:5, Funny)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:10AM (#5779982)
    Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping like the flood of trolls this sort of comparison should inspire.

  • it's all well and good.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rj-eleven ( 312679 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:12AM (#5779991)
    but it reminds me of a benchmark performed between desktop x86's and a sun machine. Given the different architectures, it really didn't make sense. However, the benchmark was supposed to show price::performance. Is this what Pabst is trying to convey? I don't take much stock in benchmarks anyway, as I would rather get my hands on it and try to break it.

    • Re:it's all well and good.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by odaiwai ( 31983 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @12:11PM (#5782235) Homepage
      No this is not what Pabst is trying to convey.

      What Pabst is trying to convery is that he needs more views on his website, even though historically, he's made a point of exagerrating the statistical differences between test results to push Asus motherboards (for example). I remember him making a huge procuction out of a less than one percent difference in the performance between sone dual processor motherboards. I realised then that either he was mathemathically incompetent or he was just a shill for his advertisers.

      Either way, he's not worth the bother of checking out anymore.

      dave

  • Current Review: Xeon vs Opteron (Score:5, Funny)

    by Judg3 ( 88435 ) <jeremy@@@pavleck...com> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:15AM (#5780003) Homepage Journal
    Next Review: Apples vs Oranges, Which has more of an Orange taste?

  • Old news... (Score:5, Informative)

    by G3ckoG33k ( 647276 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:18AM (#5780022)
    Suddenly, I feel this is old news... It came out five hours ago for gossake!

    Nonetheless here is the condensed version:

    _____________Server_______Workstation
    Opteron__ ____Very good____Good
    Xeon_________Good_________Very Good
    • hmmm....
      I think historicallly it's been the opposite of the parent's chart. Usually Intel chips are better at servers than AMD, and AMD is usually better for workstations.
      I wanna know which one is better for my all night gaming sessions of NWN and UT2003.
    • What they didn't say in their conclusion (but that I noticed) was that the main place where the Opteron didn't do well was Windows tests. Coincidently, most of the workstation tests were Windows. I can't help but wonder if the judgement (that the Opteron isn't for workstations) is a bit premature.

      • Re:Old news... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by bbqBrain ( 107591 )
        That's certainly interesting. (I can't read the article now, as Tom's seems a bit overwhelmed at the moment.) And, of course, the Opteron is unable to use its extra registers in 32-bit legacy mode. I bet the numbers would be a bit different if a beta x86-64 Windows OS was used, even with 32-bit apps.

        I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the 64-bitness of the Hammer and failing to realize that it's much more than that. Extra registers, HyperTransport, integrated memory controller...these are t

  • Opteron vs Xeon (Score:5, Funny)

    by mrgrey ( 319015 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:22AM (#5780037) Homepage Journal
    Didn't I see this in an Evangelion episode?

  • haha (Score:2, Funny)

    by Vilim ( 615798 )
    I was right, I got this link off another website (amdforums.com), when I noticed it was slowing to a crawl I immediately thought "Slashdot". What do you know! first story :p

  • Blood pumping? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:23AM (#5780045)
    "Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right?"

    I find sex better, whatever flicks your switch I guess...

  • Impressive SMP scaling (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:23AM (#5780048)
    Check the Spec benchmarks here [amd.com].

    SpecFP_rate, 2CPUs:
    Itanium2 1GHz: 30.7
    Opteron 1.8GHz: 26.7

    SpecFP_rate, 4CPUs:
    Itanium2 1GHz: 49.3
    Opteron 1.8GHz: 49.2

    Here we see the beauty of AMDs integrated memory contoller. Despite that 1GHz Itanium2 is a $4000 chip and has 3MB of cache, doubling the number of CPUs increase performance only by 60% because Itanium2 uses shared bus.

    Opteron gets impressive 84% improvement because
    memory bandwidth increases as more CPUs are added.

    In SpecInt Opteron is much more faster than more expensive Itanium2.

  • Not quite a fair comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hektor_Troy ( 262592 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:24AM (#5780051)
    The dual Xeon has 512 MB RAM.
    The dual Opteron has 2 GB RAM.

    Pretty sloppy, if you ask me.

    • Re:Not quite a fair comparison (Score:5, Funny)

      by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:32AM (#5780095) Homepage Journal
      You expected an impartial comparison from THG? You must be new here.
    • But the Opteron is running at 1.8Ghz
      The Xeon is running at 3Ghz.

      I'd like to see a benchmark vs a 1.8Ghz Xeon with 2GB RAM... I guess the Opteron would slaughter it.

      • Re:Not quite a fair comparison (Score:5, Informative)

        by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:15AM (#5780318) Homepage
        So what? MHz isn't everything. AMD is trying to make this abundantly clear with their performance ratings and talk like this is simply counterproductive.

        If you want a "fair" benchmark then it should be a 2.8GHz Xeon vs the Opteron x44, both with the same amount of memory. A better benchmark, however, may be Itanium2 vs Opteron, but you can't run standard benchmarks on the I2 -- it's simply not designed for it. Oracle transaction ratings (albeit largely disk I/O dependant) and similar server benchmarks would be useful though.

        Excluding the memory mismatch, however, it's a good idea to compare the Xeon 3.06 and the Opteron x44 -- they're the top end chips available and so the most likely for corporate shops to be choosing from. An alternate comparison would be similarly priced chips -- at current prices you'd be looking at the Xeon 2.8GHz.

    • Re:Not quite a fair comparison (Score:5, Informative)

      by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:16AM (#5780326) Homepage Journal
      It gets worse, Dual channel was available for the Opteron, but not enabled. Also, and this one is not Tom's fault, the Opteron supports DDR400, but Tom used DDR333. The problem is the super limited supplies of DDR400 w/ECC,reg.

      This is where the opteron with an 800mhz fsb with DDR333 ends up with less memory bandwidth than a Xeon with DDR266. The 533mhz bus Xeon used Dual Channel, giving it an effective 533 bus while the 800mhz bus Opteron was chokeing on 333mhz memory.

      That is why the Opteron was falling down in the workstation benchmarks, because they tended to be bandwidth hogs.

      Looking again, the opteron used 4 x 256 sticks of ram... 1 Gb not two.

  • Hrm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:27AM (#5780067)
    Nothing gets the blood pumping like a whole new generation of CPUs to compare numbers to, right?

    Seeing a naked girl is really going to blow your mind.

  • Blocking /. referrers (Score:5, Informative)

    by nutbar ( 138893 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:29AM (#5780078) Homepage
    Tom seems to be blocking referrals from slashdot, so copy and paste this to make it view the article: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/index.htm l

  • judging by the date... (Score:2, Informative)

    by non ( 130182 )
    judging by the date on the chip image, i'd say that this CPU is from the same manufacturing sample in the X-Bit review [slashdot.org].

    when are we going to see something featuring currently manufactured product?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:30AM (#5780083)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Actually, I read that the numbers were based on the equivalent performance of an old Thunderbird Athlon (non-XP), rather than pentiums.

      However, there's little doubt that they are meant to be compared to pentiums, and you raise an interesting point. Even stranger would be - what happened if intel adopted the same scheme? Then they'd both basically be making up numbers!

      • Intel is already making up the numbers.
        They can peg the clock wherever they like,
        and just introduce wait states. In fact,
        they have effectively already done this,
        but call them pipeline stages.

        A modern CPU is a hairy beast, and it has so
        many physical metrics, with such a tenuous
        relationship to application performance,
        that you could pin just about any number you
        like on it. Why stop at clocks?

        People who are intelligent enough to butter
        toast on the top use benchmarks anyhow.
    • Joe Sixpack believes MHz = speed.

      Ï really hope those in charge of purchasing servers know better, or they'd be replacing their Xeon/Itanium with a PIV anyway.

      Now, the desktop is another story, but I guess we'll have to wait till September for that. Don't be surprised if the marketing dep. make it indirectly seem as if 64bit = 2*32bit, so it must be twice as good though ;)

      Kjella

    • Probably both AMD and Intel will compare future chips to some cheap P4 and say that their new chip has 6.4 GHz of equivalent performance.

      Like in the days of yore, when new computer performance was measured in terms of the DEC VAX 11/780.

      Or, in the mid 1990s, SPECfp95 was close to 1.0 for a Sun SPARCStation 10.

      I'd be curious what the new chips do in terms of the old benchmarks. The numbers would probably be outrageously high.

      I'm glad that AMD is bringing out the Opteron. Competition in the CPU market is

    • please mod parent down.

      he is grossly wrong.

      amd speed ratings have nothing to do with intel.

      not food for thought considering you don't know what you are talking about.

  • server vs. workstation? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thorgal ( 3103 ) <thorgalNO@SPAMamiga.com.pl> on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:33AM (#5780100) Homepage
    Well, these benchmarks are supposedly suggesting that Opterons excell at server-type operations, while workstation performance is lacking. However, if you check their benchmark setups, there seems to be another way of looking at this: isn't is so that Opterons simply run better on Linux rather than Windows?
    • Well, i haven't been able to read most of the article yet, but i think the difference is they only tested with 32 bit windows, where the opteron can't use it's extra registers etc.
    • And more: Opteron needs specifically compiled binaries to show its full power. Not that I think it's a bad thing. But it shows that OpenSource solution will be more easily available for Opterons than comercial specifically compiled and optimised software, thanks gcc. I don't think Intel C++ compiler will support Opteron's new registers.
      • This is entirely correct. The distribution of SuSe linux and the applications used were designed to use the x86-64 bit mode, and get the full benefit of the new instruction set and large registers. If he was able to try some windows benchmarks designed for x86-64, he might have gotten more favorable numbers. Alas, betas of these microsoft products are nearly impossible to obtain, although they have been promised.

        Where the opteron will shine is when people start doing things like testing OpenSSL using the n

  • Too bad their web server isn't running on it (Score:3, Funny)

    by MacroRex ( 548024 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:36AM (#5780116)
    Slashdotted after 20 comments, that was quicker than usual.

  • German version of the review (Score:4, Informative)

    by dastrike ( 458983 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @07:52AM (#5780190) Homepage
    The German version of the review seems to be quite a lot faster now than the English one: http://www.de.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/index. html [tomshardware.com]

  • Memory-bandwidth? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:02AM (#5780237)
    Why does P4 with 2x64bit memory-bus get so much better results than opteron with 2x64bit memory-bus? One would think that since the mem-controller is integrated on the Opteron, it would get better results. Also, since each CPU has it's own memory-bank but they can still use other CPU's memory as well, the bandwidth should go up as number of CPU's increase. But still, P4 has more bandwidth than 2x Opterons! How can that be? IS there something wrong with the chip Tom benchmarked?
    • The Xeon's have a 533 MHz FSB, while Opteron is running at 333 MHz FSB (Technically the P4/Xeon is 133 MHz quad pumped and the Opteron is 166 MHz double pumped).

      The memory controller on the chip means that Opteron will have a much lower latency... it doesn't give it any bandwidth bonuses. AMD's own faq [amd.com] says that there's not really any such thing as an FSB with the Opteron, but that's mostly indirection. The reality is that it's still 166 Mhz... the FAQ could be (deeply) misread that the memory controller o

      • The Xeon's have a 533 MHz FSB, while Opteron is running at 333 MHz FSB (Technically the P4/Xeon is 133 MHz quad pumped and the Opteron is 166 MHz double pumped).

        1. "FSB" on Opteron is Hypertransport-link that is equivalent to 800Mhz regural FSB
        2. FSB-speed on the Opteron is meaningless when talking about mem-bandwidth, since the memory does not use the FSB to talk with the CPU, memory talks directly with CPU.

        Let me repeat: the "FSB" is NOT 333Mhz! That's the speed Athlon XP's FSB runs at! Both P4 and Op

    • Re:Memory-bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:37AM (#5780427) Homepage Journal
      Dual channel was available but not enabled.

      The opteron uses an 800mhz memory bus.

      But was chokeing on single channel DDR333

      The Xeon was running Dual channel DDR266 or 533mhz effective.

      Vast oversight (Intentional?) on Tom's part.

      The Xbit labs clawhammer article shows the memory controller pushes at 97% of DDR400 theoretical maximum.

      Now you know why all the "workstation apps" ran so poorly. They were all bandwidth intensive and Tom's ran the Opteron crippled.
  • Why don't they post comparative benchmark results with a 16mhz 386 (with a microscope to see them), so we can see how much we moved ahead in the last 10 years?

  • 40 Watts (Score:5, Informative)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:25AM (#5780371) Journal
    Keep in mind this opteron only uses 40 Watts.

  • Another review at Ace's Hardware (Score:5, Informative)

    by lorax ( 2988 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @08:46AM (#5780473)
    Ace's hardware as an in-depth review as well, and it isn't slashdotted.
    http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000251 [aceshardware.com]

  • overview (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Oldskooldave ( 532945 )
    Finally been able to read the whole article, damn 404's, I think the opteron is very reasonable as a workstation its not bleeding edge compared to the dual xeon rig, but it all comes down to the price, if amd can sell this chip slightly cheaper than the xeon then its definately gonna sell extremely well, my only worry is the yield per wafer, this is really gonna have a huge affect on the price i dont know if they can afford to price it cheaper than the xeon, im confused at where this is being marketed, is i

  • Blood pumping (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @09:33AM (#5780869) Homepage Journal
    Wow, what an image: an alternative to water-cooled overclocking. Pray to Satan that your overclocked Opteron will work, sacrifice a goat, and cool the chip with the unholy-consecrated blood.

    Jarvik brand coolant pumps, Hellfire thermal paste, copper tubing with simulated brimstone anodized finish. And as for the cosmetic aspects of the case-modding, the thematic possibilities are endless. Start with this: Horns!!!

  • Go read the review at Aces hardware ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ninja Programmer ( 145252 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2003 @10:23AM (#5781280) Homepage
    Its much better at finding server-centric applications to benchmark:

    Ace's Hardware Review [aceshardware.com]
  • Why didn't they benchmark an Operton vs. Itanium?

    Whats the point of bencharmking it against a Xeon which is still just a 32-bit CPU?
    • Look at prices. The Opteron isn't competing with the Itanium; it's competing with the Pentium 4.

      The x86 market is about dollars and speed and legacy. Number of bits are only a factor in as far as they influence the other aforementioned factors. That is what makes the Itanium such a loser. It might be a fine chip, but not within the x86's traditional market. And once you get outside that market, there are some other players (e.g. IBM, Sun, etc) who really complicate things, and they're worthy opponent

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