High End Workstation Performance Commentary
Workstation performance, as measured by SPECviewperf, has been an area where Pentium 4 has dominated recently. The 2.0GHz Opteron certainly brings this area into parity at the very least, and Opteron becomes the leader in some areas. Comparing the ATI 9800 PRO performance, we find the A64 level Opteron the top performer in DRV-08 and UGS-01 benchmarks. In other SPECview tests, performance is very competitive and much faster than we have tested with the Athlon 3200+ on nForce2.To satisfy curiosity, we also compared performance of the Workstation nVidia Quadro FX2000 video card on both the dual Xeon Intel 875 platform and the single-CPU Opteron platform. You would expect that 2 Xeon 3.06 CPUs with 1MB of cache would be the clear winner of this comparison. The results, however, are quite surprising:
| SPECviewperf 7.0 Performance nVidia Quadro FX2000 Workstation Video |
Benchmark | Asus PC-DL Dual Xeon 3.06 | nForce3 Single Opteron 2.0 |
| 3DSMax | 22.17 | 21.88 |
| DRV | 59.80 | 59.80 |
| DX | 59.83 | 59.87 |
| Light | 29.88 | 25.75 |
| PROE | 27.55 | 29.18 |
| UGS | 31.39 | 28.48 |
The results are basically even, which is amazing considering we are comparing a single 2.0 GHz Opteron to Dual 3.06 Xeon with 1Mb cache. Certainly, Opteron/Athlon64 has much improved in Workstation performance compared to Athlon.
High End Workstation Performance Benchmarks
Content Creation and General Usage Performance Benchmarks
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Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Not to worry, there will soon be more competition for Opteron in the form of Low Voltage (and price) Itaniums, Prescotts, and even 800 MHz FSB Nocona XEONs. It's going to be very fun in the next year or so.Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Am I the only one concerned that each test platform seems to use different amounts of system memory?Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
1 OF 2 things will have to happen. Either MS reduces their prices to compete with Linux or Linux will start charging/more for their OS. Open source is great and cheap right now which is why it is popular, but someone will try to commercialize it.Anonymous User - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Fortunately in the next few years many folks will be switching to Linux both 32 and 64-bit just to get away from Windoze and all the stability and security issues with virtually every version of Windoze, bar none. This will be good news for AMD and the Opteron/A64 which both run very well on Linux and 64-bit Linux is available to all right now.Once the software companies wake up and smell the coffee and pull their heads out of Microsofts's butthole, they'll start releasing apps for Linux that look and feel like those for Windoze. This will facilitate a relatively painless transition for millions of folks who would switch to Linux immediately if they could import all of their existing apps files without headaches. Thankfully with enterprise and World governments switching to Linux, there is a clear financial incentive for software makers to get their act together and fill customer needs. The World will be a much better place when consumers have the ability to purchase a quality O/S and software apps and at this stage of the game Linux is a clear winner over any Windoze O/S for stability, performance and security.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Well when the P4 first came out it was slower than the P3, and costed around $1200-1500. You expect a new series processor to be dirt cheap? Yeah right.Prescott is what, a P4 with 20w more heat dissapation and 1MB cache and several (currently) useless instructions? OK, it has some other secret features. How long though can the 2x ALU stay 2x? They will run at 6.8ghz, and getting them to work at higher speeds will be 2x as hard as the rest of the processor (and it's now supposively going to be 4x?).
Of course, I guess everyone forgot, this is just a preview, not the acutal thing, so why get so worked up over it?.
Whether the desktop version is great or not, the more Opterons you run together only get better, with the Xeon you get less in return from going 2 to 4.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
What is the reason that overclocked Opteron 244 is used instead of the real Opteron 246 that is available in retail? What is the reason to use 2 Gig of memory and compare it to a system that uses 512 MB memory? If memory doesn't matter in those bechmarks then why 2x256 isn't used?Why not to compare to Pentium 3.2 which is the top Intel desktop chip instead of 3.0 GHz?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Why on earth are the benchmark results in FLASH?Thats just really annoying.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
This benchmark is pretty funny, it leaves a lot to be desired from todays reviewers. Not that I think the athlon64 isn't a very good improvement, but the results they are showing do not match any other results people have seen, reminds me of the Hardocp reviews.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Just for your information number 49, the 2.0GHz CPU anandtech tested won't be the fastest CPU AMD releases on the 23rd, so comparing it to a 3.2GHz CPU would actually have been unfair.Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
That's not anand hahahah :p