Linux Shootout: Opteron 150 vs. Xeon 3.6 Nocona

Although this latest attempt to produce an accurate, unbiased, real world comparison of these two processors is likely more thorough than the review earlier this week, there are still critical issues we will address to get out of the way.

First of all, AMD's Opteron 150 is the highest performing AMD workstation CPU money can buy. Thus, it is priced around $600 at time of publication.  (The nearly identical FX-53 is priced slightly higher). Intel's Xeon 3.6GHz / Pentium 4 3.6F processor is the highest performing Intel workstation CPU money can't buy; although it has shown up in various OEM channels, it really has not hit the market in full force yet.  When it does, we are expected to see it retail for $850.  This automatically raises the question as to whether or not these two are directly competing processors.  Since prices in the market fluctuate daily depending on vendor stock with such high end CPUs, we leave that decision up to the reader.

Secondly, GCC 3.3.3 optimizations became a larger than expected variable in these tests.  As shown in the TSCP benchmark, changing the optimization flags wildly changed performance of the Opteron CPU, while the Nocona only received mild benefits.  We also hear that GCC 3.4 tends to increase performance on the Opteron CPUs even further, although we ran out of time to complete that test.

After all is said and done it became difficult (nearly impossible?) to justify the Xeon processor in a UP configuration over the Opteron 150, but perhaps we will see significant changes in dual and four way configurations.  We have Linux benchmark shootout between the two processors coming up, as well as a Windows analysis too. 

Once again special thanks to Super Micro for providing us with the hardware on such short notice for this review.