AMD Launches Opteron 6300 series with "Piledriver" cores

SKUs and Pricing

The AMD Opteron 6300 series has the same specifications as the 6200 series. The only changes are slightly higher clockspeeds and minor architectural improvements. So how much does AMD charge you for that?

The top models with slightly increased clockspeeds (+100MHz) are also slightly more expensive than the previous models, so you're basically paying more for more performance, which should hopefully work out as a net positive in the long run. More interesting are the midrange chips: the Opteron 6378 and 6376 are slightly more powerful than the 6278 and 6276 (same clock speeds but with architectural improvements), but they come with a 11-12% lower price.

Let's compare the AMD chips with Intel's offerings.

Our Xeon E5-2600 review showed that the 8-core Xeon E5 was between 12% and 40% faster than the 8-module Opteron at more or less the same clocks (Xeon E5 2660 at 2.2GHz versus Opteron 6276 at 2.3GHz). The AMD benchmarks seem to indicate that the new Opteron is 5 to 15% faster at the same clocks, so a 6386SE at 2.8GHz might be able to stay close to the 2.4GHz Xeon 2665, but the higher TDP does not make it very attractive. The 6386SE 2.8GHz might make sense for some HPC people though. If you can recompile your code (and use FMA), AMD claims that a 2.5GHz 6380 is just as fast as a 2.9GHz 2690.

AMD may offer pretty good value in the midrange for the server market. We measured a 7% to 18% advantage (in the most important applications) for the Xeon with 12 threads compared to the Interlagos CPU with 16 integer cores. The 5% to 15% higher single-threaded performance of the Opteron 6378 (compared to a 6278) might be good enough to beat the 2640 in some benchmarks. Of course we have to see how well the Opteron fares in the power consumption measurements.

AMD also has a few very nice budget offerings: a 3GHz to 3.3GHz 6320 with 8 integer cores sounds good compared to the 4 cores of the 2609 at 2.4GHz in a market where performance per dollar is more important than performance per Watt.

AMD fails to convince the low power market. An 8 module chip at 1.8GHz will not be able to beat a 2GHz Xeon 2630L that will consume less power. The performance per watt of the Intel chip will be significantly better and the performance alone will be about 15 to 45% better.

So far...

Besides the low power offering, the Opteron 6300 series looks quite good. The specifications and pricing of the 6276 and 6278 in particular are attractive, and those chips are catering to the bulk of the market. But the benchmarks AMD presents are hardly convincing. The SPECJBB2005 test is easy to inflate, while the recompiled HPC benchmarks are interesting to a small niche of the market but useless to the rest of us. The jury is thus still out on what Abu Dhabi will mean for AMD servers, but we hope to have a verdict in the coming weeks.