The new Opteron 6300: Finally Tested!
by Johan De Gelas on February 20, 2013 12:03 AM ESTLS-DYNA
LS-DYNA is a "general purpose structural and fluid analysis simulation software package capable of simulating complex real world problems", developed by the Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC). It is used by the automobile, aerospace, construction, military, manufacturing and bioengineering industries. Even simple simulations take hours to complete, so even a small performance increase results in tangible savings. Add to this the fact that many of our readers have been asking that we perform some benchmarking with HPC workloads and we have reasons enough to include our own LS-DYNA benchmarking.
These numbers are not directly comparable with AMD's and Intel's benchmarks as we did not perform any special tuning besides using the message passing interface (MPI) version of LS-DYNA (ls971_mpp_hpmpi) to run the LS-DYNA solver to get maximum scalability. This is the HP-MPI version of LS-DYNA 9.71. Our first test is a refined and revised Neon crash test simulation.
The second test is the "Three Vehicle Collision Test" simulation, which runs a lot longer.
Both test paint a similar picture. The new Opteron 6376 is 5% to 7% faster than the Opteron 6276. The best AMD Opteron (6380) is about 16% faster than the previous one (6276). Not bad at all, but HPC buyers are typically categorized as either going after top performance or searching for the best performance per dollar.
The first category will go after the best Xeon E5s like the Xeon E5-2690 or the 2670 (2.6GHz, 115W) if the former's power usage is too high to fit in the dense server chassis. The second category can get 10% higher performance (E5-2660 vs 6380) for a few hundred dollars more. It is close, but it is probably not convincing enough to go for AMD. Most professional buyers need a bigger incentive before they will choose the underdog over the market leader.
HPC people are less concerned about energy consumption, but even HPC data centers run into cooling and energy supply limitations. Next stop, high performance energy consumption measurements.
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arnd - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I have dual Opteron 6344 workstation system, which tends to be either near complete idle or near complete busy, so C states are extremely important to me. The CPU has power sensors that are exposed in Linux using the 'sensors' tool. With C6 enabled, I get the power consumption per socket down to 42 Watts, which still seems like a lot, but disabling C6 made it jump to 104W per socket, when under 100% load it is constantly within 1W of the 115W TDP limit.I did not see a significant impact of C1E, neither with C6 enabled nor disabled, presumably because I rarely have cores that are idle for a short period.
More annoying to me is the lack of S3 suspend mode, the system still consumes around 100W on S1.
nevertell - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
The difference I believe is that you cannot use AES-NI instructions when using Twofish and serpent. I guess that AMD's AES-NI implementation is just slower.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Sounds reasonable. The question is then why Twofish and serpent are so fast on the Opteron. They probably scale very well with cores.Yorgos - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I've been abandoning tech sites due to stupid posters and internet trolls.There is so much addition info and questions in the comments and I don't know why are you letting people ruin that feature from your site?
You should make a ranking system(similar to /. ) for users, in order to automatically hide someone's comments, so we don't have to double check every time the poster and/or the comment.
I feel stupid for making that type of comment, also reading specific stupid opinions, below that article.
silverblue - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I like your ideas, however most of the laugh (or should I say cringe?) worthy comments would be hidden and the entertainment value would be tainted by having to click the Show button all the time. ;)lwatcdr - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Or requiring real names.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I had meetings and people visiting me, so I could not "baby sit" the reactions. But if you don't react to the offensive message we can delete them. So the best way to deal with th trolls is to ignore. Sooner or later, they will be banned.coder111 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Because some of the people posting here are obviously trolling for Intel and do not bring anything constructive to the discussion.MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Yes, it is quite pathetic. An ignore button would take care of this situation nicely.iamezza - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
An ignore button and a report button would be great!