Bulldozer for Servers: Testing AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron 6200 Series
by Johan De Gelas on November 15, 2011 5:09 PM ESTRendering Performance: Cinebench
Cinebench, based on MAXON's software CINEMA 4D, is probably one of the most popular benchmarks around, and it is pretty easy to perform this benchmark on your own home machine. The benchmark supports 64 threads, more than enough for our 24- and 32-thread test servers. First we tested single-threaded performance, to evaluate the performance of each core.
Single-threaded performance is relatively poor when you do not enable Turbo Core: with that setting the Opteron 6276 scores only 0.57. So the single-threaded FP performance is about 10% lower, probably a result of the higher FP/SSE latencies of the Interlagos FPU. However, the 6276 Opteron can boost the clock speed to 3.2GHz. This 39% clock speed boost leads to a 37% (!) performance boost. The difference with the older "Istanbul" based Opteron "Magny-cours" 61xx can only get larger once software with support for the powerful FMAC and AVX capable units is available. Also newer compilers will take the longer FP latencies into account and will probably boost performance by a few percent even without using FMAC or AVX.
Before we look at the Multi-threaded benchmark, Andreas Stiller, the legendary German C't Journalist ("Processor Whispers") sent me this comment:
"You should be aware that Cinebench 11.5 is using Intel openMP (libguide40.dll), which does not support AMD-NUMA"
So while Cinebench is a valid bench as quite a few people use the Intel OpenMP libraries, it is not representative of all render engines. In fact, Cinebench probably only represent the smaller part of the market that uses the Intel OpenMP API. On dual CPU systems, the Opteron machines run a bit slower than they should; on quad CPU systems, this lack of "AMD NUMA" awareness will have a larger impact.
We did not expect that the latest Opteron would outperform the previous one by a large margin. Cinebench is limited by SSE processing power. The ICC 11.0 compiler was the fastest compiler of its time for SSE/FP intensive software, even for the Opterons (up to 24% faster than the competing compilers), but it has no knowledge of newer architectures. And of course, the intel compiler does favor the Xeons.
The Opteron 6200 has a total of eight dual issue (if you count only those pipes that do calculations) FPUs, while the Opteron 6100 has a total of 12 dual issue FPUs. The only advantage that the 6200 has (if you do not use the FMAC or AVX capabilities) is that it can interleave two FP threads on one module. So you get 16 FP threads that can dispatch one FP per clock versus 12 FP threads that can dispatch two FP per clock. That capability is especially handy when your threads are blocked by memory accesses. This is hardly the case in Cinebench (but it is probably the reason why Interlagos does so well in some HPC tests) and as a result, the Opteron 6276 cannot pull away from the Opteron 6174.
Anand reported that the best Core i7 (2600K, 4 cores/8 threads, 3.4GHz) achieves 6.86. So considering that a dual Opteron 6200 is cheaper than the dual Xeon, and more manageable than two workstations, such a renderfarm may make some sense.
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mino - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
IT had most likely to do with you running it on NetBurst (judging by no VT-X moniker).As much to do with VT-X as with a crappy CPU ... wiht bus architecture ah, thank god they are dead.
JustTheFacts - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Please explain why there is no comparison between the latest AMD processors to Intel's flagship two-way server processors: the Intel Westmere-EX e7-28xx processor family?Lest you forgot about them, you can find your own benchmarks of this flagship Intel processor here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4285/westmereex-inte...
Take the gloves off and compare flagship against flagship please, and then scale the results to reflect the price differece if you have to, but there's no good reason not to compare them that I can see. Thanks.
duploxxx - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Westmere EX 2sockets is dead, will be killed by own intel platform called romley which will have 2p and 4p.it was a stupid platform from the start and overrated by sales/consultants with there so called huge memory support.
aka_Warlock - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I think you should have done a more thorough VM test than you did. 64GB RAM?We all know single threaded performance is weak, but I still feel the server are underutilized in your test.
These CPU's are screaming heavy multi threading workloads. Many VM's. Many vCPU's.
What would the performance be if you had, say, at least 192GB of RAM and 50 (maybe more) VM's on it?
And offcourse, storage should not be a bottleneck.
I think this is where his 8modules/16threads cpu would shine.
A dual socket rack/blade. 16modules/32 threads.
Loads of RAM and a bounch of VM's.
iwod - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
It is power hungry, isn't any better then Intel, and it is only slightly cheaper, at the cost of higher electricity bill.So unless with some software optimization that magically show AMD is good at something, i think they are pretty much doomed.
It is like Pentium 4, except Intel can afford making one or two mistakes, but not with AMD.
mino - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Then the article served its purpose well.SunLord - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
So is the AMD system running 8GB DDR3-1600 DIMMS or 4GB DDR3-1333? Because you list the same DDR3-1333 model for both systems and if the Server supports 16 DIMMs well 16*4 is 64GBJohanAnandtech - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Copy and paste error, Fixed. We used DDR-3 1600 (Samsung)Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
I have wondered about this, with more cores per socket and virtualisation (organising new set of servers and buying far less hardware for the same functionality) so I'd have thought in total less server hardware is being purchased. Clearly that isn't the case though, is the money made back from more expensive servers?John
bruce24 - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
While sure which each new generation of server you need much less hardware to do the same amount of work, however worldwide people are looking for servers to do much more work. Each year companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple add much more computing power than they could get by refreshing their current servers.