Intel Dual Core Xeon Benchmarked 335
An anonymous reader writes "A few weeks back, Intel launched a new dual core chip with little applause. It appears we know now why, as the chip has been benchmarked by the chaps at GamePC. In tests against the dual core AMD Opteron processor, Intel's new chip gets thoroughly thrashed, losing out in terms of raw performance while eating a lot more power. "
Bah (Score:5, Insightful)
First concern is that though the chip has been released, motherboards configured for it aren't close to release yet. I'd rather see it benchmarked as distributed, since that's what really matters to the end user.
Second concern is power usage and heat production. If you can't make a chip as powerful as your competitors, you better make sure it is not as expensive to operate. Really, why would someone choose to use a chip that is less powerful, intrinsically costs more to operate, and costs more to cool? Chips are cheap enough that the operating costs are often now more expensive than initial cost.
Don't worry (Score:4, Insightful)
Is GamePC really Intel's target here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing to see, move along. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm seeing Intel dual-core processors appearing in devastates AMD, as somehow their dual-cores are far less expensive.
I've yet to see a mainstream PC with a dual-core AMD on the other hand.
strange. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its really surprising to think AMD blind-sided intel this badly (multi-core/x64), but I guess they really did. Good for them, and great for us. Once again supply and demand in the free market prevails.
Dude, you're getting whatever we sell you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm kinda shocked... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why always gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Check this out image [libtomcrypt.org] where "nocona" is a Pentium 820D [dual-core 64-bit P4].
Those are cycle counts for RSA-x private key operations [with padding] on various processors.
TFM == tomsfastmath
LTM == libtommath
DC == dual-core [two threaded] tomsfastmath
Tom
Re:Yet strangly... (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF??? We're talking about servers, not laptops.
Re:Yet strangly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel's sales will again beat AMD's by several fold.
Perhaps, although AMD has made impressive inroads into the server/enterprise marketplace and there's no sign of it slowing down.
The reason seems to be that most PC and server purchases are not intended for games, beyond Solitare of course,
Non sequitur, Opterons smoke Xeons at enterprise tasks like web serving, database hosting and so on, in almost every benchmark. Especially in the more enterprise-relevant 2-way and 4-way (4 or 8 core) configurations.
and people prefer the reliability, power savings and lower temperatures of the Intel chips.
RTFA. For several YEARS AMD's chips have been lower power and cooler than Intel's - a combination of doing more work at lower clock frequencies, and SOI. You're recalling something from the K6 days that is totally backwards today.
AMD should be happy they ran Cyrix out of the business but, they should have realized by now that they will not impact Intel sales no matter how vocal their fanboys might be.
AMD has already impacted Intel's sales in a big way. Did you hear about Intel's disappointing earnings today? Even worse for Intel, AMD has *creamed* the Itanium. Now 90% of what were potential Itanium customers (big bucks for Intel) are now going to do AMD64 instead...even if it happens to run on Intel silicon. Itanium is a financial and technical disaster for Intel.
Remember the days when AMD cloned Intel's instruction sets, not vice versa?
BTW, could I borrow your Opteron, I need to fry an egg for breakfast.
Wow, how...witty. At any rate, looks like Xeons are the hot ticket there... ;-)
Re:Dude, you're getting whatever we sell you! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I could upgrade my existing 2P dell servers to even inefficient dual cores that run too hot, I'd do it. But I doubt my existing servers would be able to cool them, so it's probably not going to happen anywyas. If we could get 2x dual-Opteron servers, we'd jump on it for all our ESX servers - especially with ESX3 and native x64 memory support. SWEET! But no, we'll be stuck with Xeon "EMT64" bastardized x64 CPU's because we're locked into Dell.
Re:AMD's dual cores are great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A good example of marketing management (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, you are wrong and you would not even have to read the article to check that. Both the dual-core Intel Xeon and the dual-core AMD Opteron are designed to work in a server environment. These are the chips that you find in the latest blade systems from several vendors (IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, etc.) and they are targetting big businesses, not the average consumer as you imply.
And the results are actually not good at all for Intel. "trashed" is not about 10% faster, but about a significant gap: 2 or 3 times faster in some tests for comparable chips. For other tests, the difference is smaller but still significant. Note that I am not talking specifically about the GamePC tests reported here, but also about other independant tests made with these new processors and focusing on server performance.
As I was involved in the decision process for purchasing several rather big blade systems for my company, I had meetings with all the big vendors (IBM, HP, Sun) and several smaller ones. In our meeting with Dell, they had invited a technical expert from Intel who was there to defend their dual-core CPUs and present the roadmap for their future chips. Well, after I asked some technical questions about the memory management and the performance of the Intel Xeons compared to AMD Opterons in dual-core dual-CPU environments, the statement from the Intel guy was memorable: "I think that we are more or less on par with AMD now." Coming from the incumbent and knowing that the vendors always exagerate their claims, this very weak statement was really telling a lot about where Intel stands today in the server market. They are lagging behind and they know it. For the 64-bit area, they bet the ship on Itanium/Itanium2 but AMD blew them away with the Opteron and they still haven't been able to catch up in terms of performance and power consumption. Needless to say, in the end we ditched Dell (even if they had good prices) because the Xeon-based systems did not match our performance requirements. We picked another vendor instead, and went with dual-core Opterons.
Re:Dude, you're getting whatever we sell you! (Score:3, Insightful)
He probably works for a big company with a list of approved vendors.
His CIO probably plays golf with the Dell rep.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Although, I do think AMD could do a better job of advertising to the masses... which would definitely help with mindshare.
Re:AMD's dual cores are great (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just that. The AMD dualcore chips have an on-chip connection between the cores: both cores share a crossbar fronting the memory controllers and have the on-chip equivalent of a coherent HyperTransport connection. So, you see, the AMD design is in fact a real dual-core design. The current Intel dual-cores, on the other hand, share nothing on-chip.
Re:I'm kinda shocked... (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel is trying to save their exclusive customers, like Dell. Dell and the others needs something to compete with AMD or else they are going to have to start using AMD. Intel does not want that. They don't want to lose their exclusive deals, so they give them just enough to please them.
They don't have to win the speed race. They don't have to make it better than AMD in any way. They just need something to fill the "dual core server processor" space in Dell's lineup. They delivered it. Job done.
This would also explain why they didn't make a big deal about the release. The customers that count would get the word directly, not through a press release. So why spend the money? (Of course having a piss poor performance does not help either.)
Re:AMD's dual cores are great (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly right. It is really surprising that Intel has focussed so completely, almost obessively, and for so long, on the problem of supplying the maximum number of work-cycles per unit of time (GHZ, Pipelining, Itanium's EPIC design) while seemingly paying so little attention to supply-of-work-to-do (FSB speed and architecture)
AMD has paid quite a bit of attention to the work-supply and has a much more efficiently balanced work-cycle-supply/ data-for-work design. http://www.hypertransport.org/ [hypertransport.org] gives AMD a big leg-up over Intel.
If Intel fails to do something spectacular to FSB speeds, AMD is sure to continue to pull away from Intel. The more cores and threads per CPU, the greater AMD's lead over Intel will become (at least from a performance point of view), until Intel addresses this problem.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Something really fishy about this (Score:1, Insightful)
When I see such a wide margin when dealing with multiple processors I begin to wonder if the benchmark is using all the CPU's. It just seems like the Xeons weren't using all the cores or something in some of the tests.
I don't know why that could happen but there is just too wide a margin in many of those tests. Something seems not right. I mean, I know the Opterons are generally faster, but I have never seen them be that much faster.