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
Benchmark Methods and Systems
First of all, I like to offer my thanks to my colleague Tijl Deneut who helped me out with the complex virtualization benchmarks.
None of our benchmarks required more than 20 GB of RAM. Database files were placed on a two drive RAID-0 Intel X25-E SLC 32GB SSD, with log files on one Intel X25-E SLC 32GB. Adding more drives improved performance by only 1%, so we are confident that storage is not our bottleneck.
Xeon Server 1: ASUS RS700-E6/RS4 barebone
Dual Intel Xeon "Gainestown" X5570 2.93GHz, Dual Intel Xeon “Westmere” X5670 2.93 GHz
ASUS Z8PS-D12-1U
6x4GB (24GB) ECC Registered DDR3-1333
NIC: Intel 82574L PCI-EGBit LAN
PSU: Delta Electronics DPS-770 AB 770W
Opteron Server 1 (Dual CPU): AMD Magny-Cours Reference system (desktop case)
Dual AMD Opteron 6174 2.2 GHz
AMD Dinar motherboard with AMD SR5690 Chipset & SB750 Southbridge
8x 4 GB (32 GB) ECC Registered DDR3-1333
NIC: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit
PSU: 1200W PSU
Opteron Server 2 (Dual CPU): Supermicro A+ Server 1021M-UR+V
Dual Opteron 2435 "Istanbul" 2.6GHz
Dual Opteron 2389 2.9GHz
Supermicro H8DMU+
32GB (8x4GB) DDR2-800
PSU: 650W Cold Watt HE Power Solutions CWA2-0650-10-SM01-1
vApus/Oracle Calling Circle Client Configuration
First client (Tile one)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83 GHz
Foxconn P35AX-S
GB (2x2GB) Kingston DDR2-667
NIC: Intel PRO/1000
Second client (Tile two)
Single Xeon X3470 2.93GHz
S3420GPLC
Intel 3420 chipset
8GB (4 x 2GB) 1066MHz DDR3
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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.