Bulldozer Server Benchmarks Not Promising

New submitter RobinEggs writes "Some reviews of Bulldozer's server performance have arrived. Ars Technica has the breakdown, and the results are pretty ugly. Apparently Bulldozer fares just as poorly with servers as with desktops. From the article: 'One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. ... It looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.' It's probably much too early to start editorializing about the end of AMD, or even to say with certainty that Bulldozer has failed, but my untrained eye can't yet see any possible silver lining in these new processors."

Windows is not optimized for Bulldozer

[Anonymous Coward]

TPC-C is performed on Windows 2008 see http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=111111501
Anantech tested on Windows 7.
It is known that Windows 7 and 2008 are not optimized for Bulldozer, especially at the task scheduling level.
So we do not know the real power of the Bulldozer architecture in the Windows world yet
See http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/32394-bulldozer-benchmarks-correct-definitive which unfortunately only has very few benchmarks.
You can also look at the phoronix site, where Bulldozer is tested on Linux.

Re:AMD needs its swagger back

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly AMD simply has not performed over the last year or two, with no real answers to Intel's I series.

While i totally agree on your first statement, i don't on the second. Last two years you say?.. My desktop is 1 year old, running a quad-core phenom@3.4GHz. Not only was it the best-value-for-money, costing me only 169 euro for the processor, it is also one of the fastest around - up to this very day, even for single-thread tasks.

Here's a hint. Artificial benchmarks don't say a thing. There's one thing where AMD is very, very good and outperforms intel in any way, and that's memory management. I couldn't care less for floating point performance, or any other dry/wetstone-like test. What does count though, is how well a processor does in doing several tasks at a time. Running 2 games, at the same time (or 6 if i wish). And the OS-i-be-ashamed-to-say-the-name-off. And a numbercruncher. And a webbrowser with a dozen tabs. While chatting on skype. And drawing a 30-layered image with the gimp.

And this box - doesnt' give a kick. It just does it - and each task runs just as well as were it running alone. Now tell me again, how was AMD not good on the desktop last 2 years?

A much better source for this kind of information.

[Bleek II]

Anandtech.com provides much more knowledgeable and professional reviews. They had this to about AMD's new chip, "Unfortunately, with the current power management in ESXi, we are not satisfied with the Performance/watt ratio of the Opteron 6276. The Xeon needs up to 25% less energy and performs slightly better. So if performance/watt is your first priority, we think the current Xeons are your best option. The Opteron 6276 offers a better performance per dollar ratio. It delivers the performance of $1000 Xeon (X5650) at $800. Add to this that the G34 based servers are typically less expensive than their Intel LGA 1366 counterparts and the price bonus for the new Opteron grows. If performance/dollar is your first priority, we think the Opteron 6276 is an attractive alternative." http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200/14 [anandtech.com]

Re:They are a catastrophe ...

[the linux geek]

There is roughly zero overlap between what makes a good HPC processor and what makes a good datacenter processor.

Hint: AVX throughput matters almost none when running an SQL server, but looks very good on Linpack.

Re:Bulldozer outdated already ?

[smash]

wrong. the 386-sx had a 16 bit memory bus (vs 32 bit on the DX). It had no FPU, that was a separate socket.

Re:Windows is not optimized for Bulldozer

[washu_k]

Windows is "not optimized" for Bulldozer because BD lies to the OS. A BD claims to have twice as many cores as it really has and Windows schedules as if this were true. In reality the BD "cores" are just a better form of hyper-threading. If BD said it had hyper-threading instead of real cores then Windows would schedule properly. All Linux and Windows 8 do is ignore the lies from the chip and use the hyper-threading scheduler.