AMD's 3rd generation Opteron versus Intel's 45nm Xeon: a closer look
by Johan De Gelas on November 27, 2007 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Fritz Chess Benchmark (Windows 32-bit)
WinRAR and Fritz Chess are probably less important to most people than the other benchmarks we ran. However, the reason why we include them in this article is that their profile is so different from the other applications. In this way, we get more insight into the different new architectures.
| Fritz Chess | |
| Profile | Total |
| Average IPC (on AMD 2350) | 0.99 |
| Instruction mix | |
| Floating Point | 4% |
| SSE | 0% |
| Branches | 17% |
| Performance indicators on Opteron 2350 | |
| Branch misprediction | 12% |
| L1 datacache ratio | 0.65 |
| L1 Instruction ratio | 0.37 |
| L1 datacache miss | 1% |
| L1 Instruction cache miss | 1% |
| L2 cache miss | 0% |
We have said this before but it warrants repeating: you'll find a decent amount of complex branches in a chess program. 17% branches is not that extraordinary, but the fact that 12% of those branches are mispredicted is. If we compare a 2GHz Opteron 22xx with an Opteron 23xx, we should see if the improvements in branch prediction pay off.
The Opteron 2350 is about 3% faster than the Opteron 22xx, core for core, clock for clock. We believe we can assume that the branch prediction improvements are minor, as the Fritz chess benchmark runs in the L1 and L2 cache.
HPC
Several of the HPC benchmarks are too expensive for us to test, but we can get some information from AMD's and Intel's own benchmarking. According to Intel, the new Intel Xeon 5472 (1.89 score) is about 26% faster than the Xeon 5365 (1.5 score) when running the fluent benchmark. According to AMD, the Opteron 2350 is about 10% to 60% faster than a 2.33GHz Xeon E5345. That doesn't give us much comparison data, but at first sight it seems that AMD will be competitive in Fluent even at lower clock speeds (2.5GHz versus 3GHz).
We get a little more data in LS-DYNA. Both AMD and Intel have published results.
Intel's own marketing material seems to admit that a Xeon E5472 with 800MHz memory is just as a fast as AMD's quad-core at 2GHz. AMD's 2.5GHz model will surely take the lead in LS-DYNA. Looking at the Fluent and LS-DYNA benchmarks it appears that AMD will remain very competitive in the HPC market.
One benchmark where Intel's newest chip really shines is the Black-Scholes algorithm: as most of the calculations involve divisions, the new Xeon 54xx chips are about 50% faster than their older Xeon 53xx siblings, clock for clock. Unfortunately, our compilation of Black-Scholes failed on the quad-core AMD, so we have to postpone those results for now.
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Hans Maulwurf - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Agreed, I have not seen an article as good as this one for years at Anandtech. And not for some time on other review sites as well.Thank you.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Thanks people. This kind of articles take ridiculously amounts of time and I really appreciate that you let me know that you liked the article. It keeps us going. (and I mean that!)magreen - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Excellent article, thorough and with amazing depth and expertise. Keep up the great work AT!Bluestealth - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I agree, it was a very well done article. I can't wait to see how Intel's processors preform on Hyper... errr... Common System Interface (next year?). I believe that I will be buying AMD until that happens though for any servers.Regs - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Yeah, every time I see "Johan De Gelas" I have to read it.I like the added info on the Barc's L3 cache and the intro-factoid about the new architecture.
I agree that the Barc's arrival is a year late and joined the party a little too shy. Integer performance will likely have to be addressed in the Bulldozer in 2-3 years. Which is 2-3 years too long. I would be really surprised if they can manage anything other than a die shrink for Shanghi with maybe more L3 cache and some tweaks for cache latency and SSE.
Just seems like AMD took a nose dive in development for their processors in the past 3-4 years. After the K8 I would think they would be able to come up with something more innovative. Revolutionary should of never entered their heads and they should actually look down upon themselves for using such a word after 4 years.
jones377 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Any chance you could use the same tools to profile desktop applications as well in the future?DigitalFreak - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Three months or so since "launch", and you still can't get a server with AMD quad-core chips from any of the big 3 vendors (HP, Dell, IBM). AMD really screwed the pooch on this one.jojo4u - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Yuck, ugly GIF on the first page. Please use PNG because 256 colors are not enough for screenshots ;)deathwombat - Saturday, December 1, 2007 - link
In addition to being less ugly, PNG's higher compression would also make the file smaller (using less bandwidth), which I assume is what they were going for.jkostans - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Didn't even notice.