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
Magny-Cours
You probably heard by now that the new Opteron 6100 is in fact two 6-core Istanbul CPUs bolted together. That is not too far from the truth if you look at the micro architecture: little has changed inside the core. It is the “uncore” that has changed significantly: the memory controller now supports DDR-1333, and a lot of time has been invested in keeping cache coherency traffic under control. The 1944-pin (!) organic Land Grid Array (LGA) Multi Chip Module (MCM) is pictured below.
The red lines are memory channels, blue lines internal HT cache coherent connects. The gray lines are external cache HT connections, while the green line is a simple non coherent I/O HT connect.
Each CPU has two DDR-3 channels (red lines). That is exactly the strongest point of this MCM: four fast memory channels that can use DDR-1333, good for a theoretical bandwidth peak of 42.7 GB/s. But that kind of bandwidth is not attainable, not even in theory bBecause the next link in the chain, the Northbridge, only runs at 1.8GHz. We have two 64-bit Northbridges both working at 1.8 GHz, limiting the maximum bandwidth to 28.8 GB/s. That is price AMD’s engineers had to pay to keep the maximum power consumption of a 45nm 2.2 GHz below 115W (TDP).
Adding more cores makes the amount of snoop traffic explode, which can easily result in very poor scaling. It can get worse to the point where extra cores reduce performance. The key technology is HT assist, which we described here. By eliminating unnecessary probes, local memory latency is significantly reduced and bandwidth is saved. It cost Magny-cours 1MB of L3-cache per core (2MB total), but the amount of bandwidth increases by 100% (!) and the latency is reduced to 60% of it would be without HT-assist.
Even with HT-assist, a lot of probe activity is going on. As HT-assist allows the cores to perform directed snoops, it is good to reach each core quickly. Ideally each Magny-cours MCM would have six HT3 ports. One for I/O with a chipset, 2 per CPU node to communicate with the nodes that are off-package and 2 to communicate very quickly between the CPU nodes inside the package. But at 1944 pins Magny-Cours probably already blew the pin budget, so AMD's engineers limited themselves to 4 HT links.
One of the links is reserved for non coherent communication with a possible x16 GPU. One x16 coherent port communicates with the CPU that is the closest, but not on the same package. One port is split in two x8 ports. The first x8 port communicates with the CPU that is the farthest away: for example between CPU node 0 and CPU node 3. The remaing x16 and x8 port are used to make communication on the MCM as fast as possible. Those 24 links connect the two CPU nodes on the package.
The end result is that a 2P configuration allows fast communication between the four CPU nodes. Each CPU node is connected directly (one hop) with the other one. Bandwidth between CPU node 0 and 2 is twice than that of P0 to P3 however.
Whilte it looks like two Istanbuls bolted together, what we're looking at is the hard work of AMD's engineers. They invested quite a bit of time to make sure that this 12 piston muscle car does not spin it’s wheels all the time. Of course if the underground is wet (badly threaded software), that will still be the case. And that'll be the end of our car analogies...we promise :)
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zarjad - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I understand that HT can be disabled in BIOS and that some benchmarks don't like HT.elnexus - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
I can report that one of my customers, performing intensive image processing, found that DISABLING hyper-threading on a Nehalem-based workstation, actually IMPROVED performance considerably.It seems that certain applications don't like hyper-threading, while others do. I always recommend that my customers perform sensitivity analyses on their computing tasks with HT on and off, and then use whichever is best.
tracerburnout - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
How is it possible that Intel's Xeon X5670 rig returns 19k+ for a score while AMD's magny-cours returns only 2k+?? I only question the results of this benchmark chart because Intel's Xeon X5570 rig returns only around 1k. How can a X5670 be 19x faster than a X5570?? And I doubt the same is true for the magny-cours by being just 10.5% of what the X5670 can do.(is there an extra '0' by accident in there?)
tracerburnout
proud supporter of AMD, with a few Intel rigs for Linux only
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
No, it is just that Sisoft uses the new AES instructions of West-mere. It is a forward looking benchmark which tests only a small part of a larger website code base. So that 19x faster will probably result in 10 to 20% of the complete website being 19x faster. So the real performance impact will be a lot slower. It is interesting though to see how much faster these dedicated SIMD instructions are on these kinds of workloads.alpha754293 - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
If you guys need help with setting up or running the Fluent/LS-DYNA benchmarks let me know.I see that you don't really spend as much time writing or tweaking it as you do with some of the other programs, and that to me is a little concerning only because I don't think that it is showing the true potential of these processors if you run it straight out-of-the-box (especially with Fluent).
Fluent tends to have a LOT of iterations, but it also tends to short-stroke the CPU (i.e. the time required to complete all of the calculations necessary is less than 1 second and therefore; doesn't make full use of the computational ability.)
Also, the parallelization method (MPICH2 vs. HP MPI) makes a difference in the results.
You want to make sure that the CPUs are fully loaded for a period of time such that at each iteration, there should be a noticable dwell time AT 100% CPU load. Otherwise, it won't really demonstrate the computational ability.
With LS-DYNA, it also makes a difference whether it's SMP parallelization or MPP parallelization as well.
k_sarnath - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
The most baffling part is how linux could engage 12-CPUs much better than windows. I am obviously curious about the OS platform for other tests.. Similary MS SQL was able to scale well on multi-cores... In this context, I am not sure how we can look at the performance numbers... A badly scaling app or OS could show the 12-core one in bad light.OneEng - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Hi Johan,I have followed your articles from the early day's at Ace's and have a good respect for the technical accuracy of your articles.
It appears that the X5570 scaling between 4 and 8 cores has very little gain in the Oracle Calling Circle benchmark. Furthermore, the 24 cores of MC at 2.2Ghz are way behind. Westmere appears to do quite well, but really should not be able to best 8 cores in the X5570 with all else being equal.
I have heard some state that the benchmark is thread bound to a low number of threads (don't know if I am buying this), but surely something fishy is going on here.
It appears that there is either a real world application limit to core scaling on certain types of Oracle database applications (if there are, could you please explain what features an app has when these limits appear), or that the benchmark is flawed in some way.
I have a good amount of experience in Oracle applications and have usually found that more cores and more memory make Oracle happy. My experience seems at odds with your latest benchmarks.
Any feedback would be appreciated .... Thanks!
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I am starting to suspect the same. I am going to dissect the benchmark soon to see what is up. It is not disk related, or at least that surely it is not our biggest problem. Our benchmark might not be far from the truth though, I think Oracle really likes the big L3-cache of the Westmere CPU.If you have other ideas, mail at johanATthiswebsiteP
heliosblitz2 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
You wroteTest-Setup:
Xeon Server 1: ASUS RS700-E6/RS4 barebone
Dual Intel Xeon "Gainestown" X5570 2.93GHz, Dual Intel Xeon “Westmere” X5670 2.93 GHz
6x4GB (24GB) ECC Registered DDR3-1333
"Also notice that the new Xeon 5600 handles DDR3-1333 a lot more efficiently. We measured 15% higher bandwidth from exactly the same DDR3-1333 DIMMs compared to the older Xeon 5570."
That is not exactly the reason, I think.
The reason ist you populated the second memory-bank in both setups.
Intel specification:
Westmere-1333MHZ-CPUs run with 1333 MHZ with second bank populated while
Nehalem-1333MHZ-CPUs run with 1066 MHZ with second bank populated
That could be updated.
Compare tech docs on Intel site: datasheet Xeon 5500 Part 2 and datasheet Xeon 5600 Part 2
Arnold.
gonerogue - Saturday, April 10, 2010 - link
The Viper is a V10 and most certainly not a traditional muscle car ;)