Bulldozer for Servers: Testing AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron 6200 Series

Power Management in Windows Server 2008 SP2

Enabling the C-states in ESX 5i might bring the Opteron 6276 an improved performance/watt ratio. The question is whether the low power consumption at light loads will negate the performance impact. Although power consumption is lowered by using the "C-state enable" tweak, it is not spectacular: 10% lower energy consumption in idle will probably not give the Opteron 6276 an amazing performance/watt ration in ESXi. The impact of this tweak will make a difference in our EWL testing, not in the "full speed ahead" benchmarks. Also, our vApus FOS EWL testing showed that the Xeon consumed 25% less energy, so it will remain ahead.

As the virtualization benchmarks require more time to run, we will have to delay investigating them for a later article. But what about Windows 2008 R2? The idle power of the Opteron 6276 was excellent there. So which power policy should be chosen in Windows 2008? We compared Opteron performance in "High performance" to the Opteron 6276 performance when the power management policy was set to "Balanced.

If we combine the our idle power consumption measurements with these numbers, things get a lot clearer. The "balanced" power policy disables turbo. Therefore, the maximum performance boost from enabling "high performance" should be 13%. The TrueCrypt benchmarks show much larger increases (see (*)), which we honestly don't understand. The performance boost (40%) is only possible if the CPU boosts to 3.2GHz, but that is not supposed to happen. First, the TrueCrypt software is well threaded and uses all clusters (32 threads). Second, we disabled C6, so normally the CPU is not able to boost to 3.2GHz. Third, our monitoring clearly indicated a 2.6GHz clock as expected.

We also did a quick x264 4.0 benchmark (1st pass) which is lightly threaded and showed the same performance (46%!) increase by simply switching from "Balanced" to "High performance" (turbo limited to 2.6GHz, no C6). The Xeon only got a 13% increase in performance..

Closer monitoring reveals that "Balanced" frequently reduces the cores to 1.4GHz. So we have a similar situation as the one where we found power management problems on the AMD "Istanbul" Opteron when the power policy was set to "Balanced".

Basically "Balanced" brings the clock speed down to a low P-state even when a thread is demanding the maximum processing power. Or in other words, the power manager is too eager to bring the clock speed down instead of looking ahead: the polling is blind for the very near future. The result is that quite often the workload gets processed at 1.4GHz (for a short time).

In contrast, the high performance setting does not make use of frequency scaling besides Turbo. So the CPU runs at 2.3GHz at the very minimum and frequently reaches 2.6GHz. So if you buy an Opteron 6200 server, it is strongly advised to chose the "High Performance" setting. Under light load, the balanced power manager saves a few percentage of power running idle, but in our opinion, it is not worth the large performance degradation. Notice also that the Xeon hardly suffers from the same problem with the exception of the AES-NI enabled TrueCrypt bench, and even then the performance impact is significantly lower.

In a nutshell: the power policy "Balanced" strongly favors the Xeon as the performance impact is non-existent or much lower. Let us see some raw performance numbers.