The new Opteron 6300: Finally Tested!
by Johan De Gelas on February 20, 2013 12:03 AM ESTConclusions
For those that prioritize performance/watt or performance/dollar and for the CPU enthusiasts, we've summarized our findings in a comparison table. We made four columns for easy comparison:
- In the first column, we compare the fastest Opteron with Intel's best offering. The closer the AMD Opteron can get to the E5-2660, the more price advantage can compensate for the higher power usage of the Opteron.
- In the second column, we compare the Opteron with the best performance per dollar ratio with a comparably priced Xeon.
- In the third column we measure how much progress AMD has made by replacing the Bulldozer core with the Piledriver core (higher IPC and clock).
- The fourth column gives you an idea of how much the small changes inside the Piledriver have improved the IPC.
We also group our benchmarks in different software groups and indicate the importance of this software group in the server market (we discussed this here). 100% means that both CPUs perform equally.
| Software: Importance in the market |
Opteron 6380 vs Xeon E5-2660 |
Opteron 6376 vs Xeon E5-2630 |
Opteron 6380 vs Opteron 6276 |
Opteron 6376 vs Opteron 6276 |
Virtualisation: 20-50% |
||||
| ESXi + Linux |
86% |
104% |
120% |
111% |
OLTP, ERP : 10% |
|
|
|
|
| SAP S&D 2-tier |
95%** |
N/A |
105%* |
100%* |
HPC: 5-7% |
|
|
|
|
| LS Dyna |
92% |
97% |
116% |
105% |
Back-end webserver: 10-15% |
||||
| SPECjbb2013 |
85% |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
Rendering software: 2-3% |
|
|
|
|
| Cinebench |
84% |
98% |
115% |
106% |
| 3DS Max 2012 (Mental Ray) |
56% |
66% |
143% |
126% |
|
|
|
|
||
Other: N/A |
|
|
|
|
|
Encryption Decryption AES |
71%77% |
94%96% |
101%101% |
100%100% |
|
Encryption Decryption Twofish/Serpent |
113%108% |
132%128% |
115%113% |
107%103% |
|
Compression decompression |
100%53% |
118%60% |
113%108% |
105%100% |
* estimate
** Rough estimate
After reviewing the Xeon-E5 we concluded:
"...it will be hard to recommend the current Opteron 6200. The Opteron 6200 might still have a chance as a low end virtualization server. After all, quite a few virtualization servers are bottlenecked by memory capacity and not by raw processing power. The Opteron can then leverage the fact that it can offer the same memory capacity at a lower price point. The Opteron might also have a role in the low end, price sensitive HPC market, where it still performs very well. Whether you want high performance per dollar or performance per watt, the Xeon E5-2660 is simply a home run. End of story."
To sum it up, the Xeon E5 was the best choice for most applications, as the Opteron 6200 could only leverage its price advantage in the low end virtualization and HPC market. But the lower acquisition costs were easily negated by the higher power draw and the fact that in most IT projects a few hundred dollars per server does not matter.
The new Opteron 6376 offers 5% to 11% better performance per clock, 8% lower energy consumption, 6% lower peak power draw, and an 11% lower price than the Opteron 6276. That's all good, but there is more. Keeping the G34 platform alive has a very positive effect on the OEM pricing: the Opteron servers are tangibly cheaper. The price difference is quite a bit higher than the CPU list prices suggest. You can get a 6380 based server for the price of a Xeon E5-2640 based server.
All these small steps forward make the AMD Opteron attractive again for the price conscious buyers looking for a virtualization host or an HPC crunching machine. The Opteron machines need more energy to do their job, but once again you get better performance per dollar than Intel's midrange offerings.
However, if your consulting or software costs are a lot higher than the hardware costs, the octal core Xeons offer an excellent performance/watt ratio and are by far the best performers too. In a nutshell, Intel's octal core Xeons are still unmatched, but AMD is putting some pressure on Intel's hex-core midrange offerings, and that is always good news for the customers.
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Sivar - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Please go away. You don't add any new information to the discussion.Your writing is of a teenager who knows nothing of processor architecture, the brilliant engineers at both AMD and Intel, or the competitive landscape.
You present no data, only misinformed opinion. You reduce the quality of this discussion, and have shown no interest in improving your knowledge.
JamesAnthony - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
In the article it mentions you were using the E5-2660 CPU (8 core 2.2 GHz) 95W, in a Dell PowerEdge R720 serverIt may have been a lot more useful to also have included the E5-2680 (8 core 2.7 GHz) and the E5-2690 (8 Core 2.9 GHz) as while they are 130W parts, they are ones that are often used in the PowerEdge R720 and from what we find in a lot of server sales the higher performance ones are very popular for transactional database servers and payment processing servers.
If you want to go head to head on Intel's top part vs AMD's top part, then it would seem it should be the E5-2690 vs 6386 SE
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
We all know that when you want top performance, Intel is the way to go. So I don't really see the point, even AMD will tell you that the 6376 and 6380 are their most competitive parts.. It is pretty obvious that the E5-2690 2.9 GHz will be faster and consume less than a 6386SE. I don't think our readers really need to see numbers on that.And I really doubt that the E5-2690 are sold that much. Most reports say that the top bins with the highest TDP are less than 5% of the total sales.
lwatcdr - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Wow this is about the most gibberish I have seen in a post ever.Good heavens you are an idiot.
Let's just tear this post bits so this person will NEVER post on here again.
1"No, it's worth per dollar that you have paid to buy Intel based servers. Intel is more reliable because it has Hyperthreading so you can reduce the latencies that will occur in every workloads."
Hyperthreading has nothing to do with reliability. So that was a waste of bandwidth.
"Unlike AMD's engineers who can not design a microprocessor properly. It was AMD's own fault why AMD did not have money like Intel"
My I introduce you to Titan http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/titan/ The worlds most powerful computer and powered by AMD cpus. AKA yea I think that AMD can actually do pretty well at designing CPUs so this part of your post is also pure manure.
"Look 99% Bank's in the world uses Intel based ATM as Intel processor can send information without any error." And here we can see that you understand nothing about digital theory or communications. Again a waste of bandwidth.
"That is why IBM itself does not use Power based processors for its ATM machine because its CEO has admitted that its engineers are not capable to design a lower power processor. So, IBM uses Intel as the standard processor to exchange information between ATM machine to server, so every digits that sent will come in exact same digits when it has been received."
The IBM power line is for high end systems not for ATM machines. Odds are good that many banks use Power based system for handling ATM transactions. IBM uses Intel or AMD because it is cheap and you can get standard boards. As to the every digit sent nonsense. IT IS DIGITAL you MORON. The communications links have error checking and correction not the CPUs. Please NEVER WASTE OUR TIME AGAIN, YOU KNOW NOTHING OF VALUE ON THIS SUBJECT.
toyotabedzrock - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Something is wrong with the LZMA benchmarks.Can you do a realworld test? There are scripts out there to do this.
LZMA is built around the idea that decompression is supposed to be much faster than compression.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
From the 7zip manual:"The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. "
So that is the reason why the compression MIPS values are in the same order as the decompression. The decompression "MB/s" values are indeed about 10x and more higher than compression.
Oldboy1948 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
It is an interesting bench and if cache and memory are fast decompress and compress will be very close. It looks better for Bulldozer in this:http://www.7-cpu.com/
ARM has a long way to go if it will be a server one day.
extide - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Can we PLEASE get folding@home benches?! musky on the hardocp forums has come up with a system where you can run repeatable benchmarks. Myself as well as many others would really love to see F@H benches on systems like this!JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Ok, Link? :-)alpha754293 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Because of the way that the current Opteron architecture is (1 FPU per module), did you run with the number of LS-DYNA processes equal to the number of FPUs on chip or did you run it based on per "core" (i.e. 2 processes per module)?