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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Per Core. So with the -np 32 setting. I have tried less before, but the LS-DYNA really likes the extra load and store units of the second unit. so 32 MPI processes give a 30% boost.alpha754293 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
That's a healthy boost! It's amazing how these technologies are maturing to the point where conventional wisdom that they might be starved for FPU resources isn't enough to slow them down.It'd be interesting to see whether it makes a difference if you were to let the OS handle the job/process scheduling or whether manual intervention can help reduce some of the thread/process migration overhead, especially across 16 FPUs.
dmytty - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Before the benchmarks came in, I looked at an HPC build for the new 6300 series. I saw the real sweet spot for AMD being the 6344 which is a CPU of type 2.6 Ghz @ 12 or 6 core (depending how you define a 'core'). Anandtech never mentioned this CPU in the review. (?)In simple $ terms for the CPU, it's the E5 2640 @ $815 vs the Opteron 6344 @ $415. So how does AMD not have a decisive price advantage?
In 4S land the price advantage widens.
AMD 4S...I priced a build (not including a case) at ~$3860 for 4 x 6344, 128 GB RAM, mobo and PSU. Note that this mobo could also go out to 256 GB. CPU cost is 4 x 6344 = $1660. Again, total system cost was $3860.
Intel 4S...I picked the 4607 as being the best 'bang for the buck processor'. It's 6 cores @ 2.2 Ghz. However, at $885 per 4607 processor the CPU cost is more than double than AMD (ie 4x Intel 4607 = $3540). The same build cost using the Intel 4607 would then be $5740.
AMD @ $3860 vs Intel @ $5740. Why did Anandtech not talk about 4S? Why no mention of the 6344?
dmytty - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
I forgot to mention that the Intel board I specified for 4S build was $1200 whereas the AMD board was $800.A marketing person would call the system cost comparison ~$3k vs $~6k.
Again, am I missing something?
The AMD 6344 based 4S system has a ~19% clockspeed advantage and comes in at 62% of the cost.
Worried about electrical cost? You can buy 700 watts of PV solar panels with the cost savings between AMD and Intel. 700 watts peak = ~3.5 kwh daily output. That would nicely mitigate (and then some) the 20 watts/cpu difference (80 watts total with 4x cpu) between AMD 6344 and Intel 4607. You would net about 1.5 kwh/day electricity going with the AMD + PV over the slightly more efficient Intel.
geok1ng - Monday, May 19, 2014 - link
this is all and good, but looking at spec int 2006 results, Abu Dhabi still does not match performance/watt of Magni Cours opterons. And the best competition AMd can offer against 2 gen old Xeons is still the Opteron 6180.