AMD's 12-core "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6174 vs. Intel's 6-core Xeon
by Johan De Gelas on March 29, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
The SKUs
The Opteron 6176 looks a bit ridiculous as it delivers only 4% more performance at 30% higher power and 20% higher prices. The real reason behind this CPU is to battle another tanker, the Nehalem EX that Intel is going to launch tomorrow. The TDP and clockspeeds of that huge chip are very similar. If your application scales poorly and you don't care about power consumption, the X5677 is your champion; it is probably the fastest chip on the market for applications with low thread counts.
| AMD vs. Intel 2-socket SKU Comparison | |||||||||
|
Intel Xeon Model
|
Cores | TDP | Speed (GHz) | Price | AMD Opteron Model | Cores | TDP | GHz | Price |
| W5680 | 6 | 130W | 3.30 GHz | $1663 | 6176 SE | 12 | 105/137W | 2.3 GHz | $1386 |
| X5670 | 6 | 95W | 2.93 GHz | $1440 | |||||
| X5660 | 6 | 95W | 2.80 GHz | $1219 | 6174 | 12 | 80/115W | 2.2 GHz | $1165 |
| X5650 | 6 | 95W | 2.66 GHz | $996 | 6172 | 12 | 80/115W | 2.1 GHz | $989 |
| X5677 | 4 | 130W | 3.46 GHz | $1663 | 2439SE | 6 | 105/137W | 2.8 GHz | ? |
| X5667 | 4 | 95W | 3.06 GHz | $1440 | |||||
| 6168 | 12 | 80/115W | 1.9 GHz | $744 | |||||
| E5640 | 4 | 80W | 2.66 GHz | $744 | 6136 | 8 | 80/115W | 2.4 GHz | $744 |
| E5630 | 4 | 80W | 2.53 GHz | $551 | 6134 | 8 | 80/115W | 2.3 GHz | $523 |
| E5620 | 4 | 80W | 2.40 GHz | $387 | 6128 | 8 | 80/115W | 2.0 GHz | $266 |
| L5640 | 6 | 60W | 2.26 GHz | $996 | 6164 HE | 12 | 65/? W | 1.7 GHz | $744 |
| 6128 HE | 8 | 65/? W | 2.0 GHz | $523 | |||||
| 6124 HE | 8 | 65/? W | 1.8 GHz | $455 | |||||
| L5630 | 4 | 40W | 2.13 GHz | $551 | |||||
| L5620 | 4 | 40W | 1.86 GHz | $440 | |||||
The most interesting parts that AMD offers are the dodeca-core 6174 (2.2GHz), the octal-core 6136 (2.4GHz) and the octal-core low power 6128 (2.0GHz). The 6174 targets those with well scaling multi-threaded applications such as huge databases and virtualized loads. The 8-core 6136 might even be better as most schedulers find it easier to distribute threads and process over a power of 2 cores. Lots of applications also don't scale beyond 16 cores and the chip comes with a 200MHz clockspeed bonus and a very reasonable price.
The 6128 HE is also an interesting one. The 6128 HE might be a good way to reconcile low response times with low power, but we'll have to find that out later.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
Accord99 - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
The X5670 is 6-core.JackPack - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
LOL. Based on price?Sorry, but you do realize that the majority of these 6-core SKUs will be sold to customers where the CPU represents a small fraction of the system cost?
We're talking $40,000 to $60,000 for a chassis and four fully loaded blades. A couple hundred dollars difference for the processor means nothing. What's important is the performance and the RAS features.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Good post. Indeed, many enthusiast don't fully understand how it works in the IT world. Some parts of the market are very price sensitive and will look at a few hundreds of dollars more (like HPC, rendering, webhosting), as the price per server is low. A large part of the market won't care at all. If you are paying $30K for a software license, you are not going to notice a few hundred dollars on the CPUs.Sahrin - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
If that's true, then why did you benchmark the slower parts at all? If it only matters in HPC, then why test it in database? Why would the IDM's spend time and money binning CPU's?Responding with "Product differentiation and IDM/OEM price spreads" simply means that it *does* matter from a price perspetive.
rbbot - Saturday, July 10, 2010 - link
Because those of us with applications running on older machines need comparisons against older systems in order to determine whether it is worth migrating existing applications to a new platform. Personally, I'd like to see more comparisons to even older kit in the 2-3 year range that more people will be upgrading from.Calin - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
Some programs were licensed by physical processor chips, others were licensed by logical cores. Is this still correct, and if so, could you explain in based on the software used for benchmarking?AmdInside - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
Can we get any Photoshop benchmarks?JohanAnandtech - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
I have to check, but I doubt that besides a very exotic operation anything is going to scale beyond 4-8 cores. These CPUs are not made for Photoshop IMHO.AssBall - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Not sure why you would be running photoshop on a high end server.Nockeln - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I would recommend trying to apply some advanced filters on a 200+ GB file.Especially with the new higher megapixel cameras I could easilly see how some proffesionals would fork up the cash if this reduces the time they have to spend in front of the screen waiting on things to process.