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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coder543 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
99%? I love your highly scientific numbers. and yes, of course only Intel can design a perfect processor. I'm glad you were here to let everyone know.To quote Abraham Lincoln, (no, not really) "All of our servers run Intel. Everything AMD makes is no better than British tea."
Tams80 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
How much are Intel paying you? XDSeriously though; you've gone through the entire comments* posting walls of texts that add little to the discussion. Not only that, but your posts are a little offensive.
*I realise I'm being hypocritical here.
JKflipflop98 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Well, Intel does pay me and I'll be the first to say these chips are lookin pretty good in comparison with their previous generation counterparts. Good value for the money for sure.As Anand says, however, HPC users are usually after the "extreme" ends of the scale. They're either after max performance or max performance to fit into a certain power/heat envelope. In either case, we win.
Tams80 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I'm sure you know what I mean. It wasn't exactly high brow humour.They certainly do look good, especially for a company that has already invested in AMD chips. Intel may well be better in both use cases, but at least AMD are providing competent competition.
tech6 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
The AMD 6x000 series has always looked nearly competitive on paper but is nowhere near Intel performance and efficiency. We have 3 data centers and one is running a mix of 6100 and 6200 Opterons while the others a re older Xeon 7300s and new E5 Xeons. In terms of single threaded and total performance of the 6x00 series cannot keep up with even old 7300 Xeons and can't touch the E5s. What AMD needs is a 30-40% boost in real world performance before they could be considered competitive. AMD also needs better relations with VMWare to optimize memory management on that platform.The price difference won't help them as the cost for a data center host is mostly software and can be $15 vCloud and $10K hardware. That reduces the cost advantage to 5% but delivers worse performance and uses more power.
Most data centers are looking to get the most from their VMWare investments while reducing power consumption and these AMDs do neither.
duploxxx - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
interesting information, but hard to catch if you don't add some figures and real data.Firsts of all the 7300 series had huge disadvantages with there FSB, so mentioning that these are way faster then the 6100-6200 opteron series is debatable. I 100% tend to disagree and we had severe Vmware performance issues on these machines on our highend applications.
i'll just used anandtech as a refference:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2851/8
http://www.it.anandtech.com/show/2978/amd-s-12-cor...
even the 7400 series are a dog against opteron 8000 series and they are way older and slower against the 6000 series.
for the E5 you have a point there, often the E5 series show a higher responsive platform, but once you load real life applications within hypervisor and they are starting to hit those HT cores we have seen several degraded performance within our datacenters, this is not really resulted into the anandtech VAPU's scores due to some sw within the benchmark that provides some code optimised results for the intels (the web servers) hence the higher score.
The 6200 series did showe some response disadvantages but many things have to do with configuration of bios and power profiles in both server and hypervisor. might want to blame the setup rather then the servers. so for 6200 series we actually bought a 10% higher clock speed version to cover that, but reduced that again now with 6300 series.
silverblue - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I'm going to go trawl the internet (note I said trawl, not troll - very important to bear in mind) for articles on FX CPUs resulting in PCs dying... nope, no matches. Funny, huh?I've also run a search concerning AMD CPUs producing incorrect results and crashing; any such occurrences would be the results of design bugs which, I must point out, are not limited to AMD. Nehalem had a bug causing spurious interrupts that locks up the hypervisor on Windows Server 2008 R2, for example. Core 2 had a huge list of bugs.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
It is hard to disagree with the statement, knowing how overpaid US IT professionals are. But I just want to point out that this mentality is one of the reasons IT is being outsourced at a furious rate. Keep that in mind before you go blaming someone else for US jobs being lost.This meager cost savings may not matter here, but what about some company in Asia? They might actually bite on a few hundred dollar savings, especially if they are ordering quantities in the hundreds. In that case, $300 becomes $30,000. Which might be more than they spend on the people who deploy those servers.
ExarKun333 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Outsourced work isn't much cheaper these days and the workers are of much less quality, on a whole.sherlockwing - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Except in Asia( especially developing countries) the cost of electricity is a lot higher due to rapidly expanding industry,population & lacking power plants.