Balancing Power, Price, and Performance in the Server CPU World
by Johan De Gelas on March 3, 2011 7:07 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- AMD
- Intel
- 1000W
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Real-World Power Use
In the real world you do not run your virtualized servers at their maximum just to measure the potential performance, but neither do they run idle. The user base will create a certain workload and expect this workload to be performed with the lowest response times. The general idea behind this new benchmark scenario is that each server runs exactly the same workload and that we then measure the amount of energy consumed. You can find more detail about our real-world power test here.
You get what you pay for of course. The Opteron 4122 is extremely cheap, but these are the most leaky chips that pass the quality tests. Remember the quad-core 2.2GHz will consume at the most 95W (or almost 25W per core) while the hex-core 4170 HE will never pass 65W (11W per core) despite the fact that they are running at almost the same clockspeed (2.1GHz). So the 4170 HE is roughly more than twice as efficient.
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Zoomer - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Sure, obviously McAfee can magically make chips designed and produced before the acquisition more secure.duploxxx - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
SAP:http://www.sap.com/ecosystem/customers/directories...
oracle:
Is turning all heads up side down, once they notice the volume shrink of x86 they will also drop it
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/analystreports/...
HangFire - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
"...very inexpensive server, with a barebone price of only ~$1500 for two servers."Did you mean "sockets"?
Penti - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
He means two servers. Or rather two nodes if you like. 2 pieces 2-way server.bobbozzo - Monday, March 7, 2011 - link
That server has 2 dual-socket motherboards in 1U; it's 2 servers in one, each with 2 CPU sockets.ERJ - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Home electric pricing is very different than rack pricing. Consider, for a good datacenter, you need UPS and power generators capable of matching every watt in use. You need pdu's. You have extra heat generation so you need additional cooling.For our colo space we pay somewhere in the range of $500 a month for a 30amp 120v circuit. Getting the best performance per watt is definitely part of our criteria.
Stuka87 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
I gotta thank you for the laugh. Never have I thought the word "craps" would make me laugh so much. I think it may be that you seem to use that word in every single post combined with one of the most narrow minded points of views I have seen on this site.All our craps are belong to you.
silverblue - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
AMD must be good at the casino, what with all these "craps".I've long since filed sans2212 in the same category as SiliconDoc, under "has nothing to bring to the discussion whatsoever aside of (an initial period of) light entertainment for all readers (which rapidly becomes tedious)".
VJ - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
"You can get a slightly faster 1.8GHz version, the 4164 EE, but that chip costs more than twice as much ($698). As we are searching for low power and inexpensive CPUs, it didn't make the cut. The only disadvantage other than the lower clock speed is the lower clocked HT3 link at 2GT/s instead of 6.4GT/s."It's a bit of a weird paragraph since I was first thinking that you were suggesting the 4164 EE does 6.4GT/s but (for your sake) I can also interpret "instead of" in the final sentence to refer to the other AMD cpus you're testing here.
But it's still a deficient paragraph considering "the lower clocked HT3", since in reality, this resolves to an HT1 (for the 4162 EE).
It's like a car test mentioning a "less powerful V8 engine" when they're referring to a V6.
Gaat lekker, he?
oneoho - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
great article, I was about to build some low power consumption / cooling requirement servers. This will help immensely.