New benchmarks for AMD's 2.5 GHz quadcore Opteron

Dell has published the first figures for the upcoming 2.5 GHz quadcore Opteron 2360 SE and Opteron 8360 SE on the benchmark web site www.spec.org. The first benchmarks published in autumn of 2007 were disqualified because the AMD processors were not available, so this recent publication represents the first official benchmarks for AMD's fastest server processors. Dell made the measurements with the new PowerEdge R805 – 2 CPU sockets – and R905 – 4 CPU sockets – servers.

Advertisement

The measurement values confirmed that "native" AMD quad cores mainly score well in scaling – due to fast HyperTransport connections between processors and fast memory access by the memory controllers integrated in each processor. While Opterons are much slower than Xeons at integer processing, common in general-purpose servers, they are much faster at floating-point calculations (fp_rate). Intel's Xeons, and especially the MP-Xeons in the 7000 series for servers with 4 CPU sockets, have quite a bit of catching up to do. Four Opterons are roughly twice as fast at floating-point calculations.

In our table, we also included IBM's Power6 servers, which cost roughly the same – such as the JS22 Express blade server and, with some restrictions, the Power 570 – formerly System p570. Like IBM, Sun sells x64 servers with AMD and Intel processors in addition to devices with Sun's own "Niagara" processor, the UltraSPARC T2 and its version for servers with two CPU sockets, called Victoria Falls.

In addition to CPU2006 benchmarks, spec.org also provides SPECweb2005 results. Here, the HP ProLiant DL385 G5 with two Opteron 2356s – 2.3 GHz – scored 30,007 points ahead of the ProLiant DL380 G5 with two Xeon X5460s – 3.16 GHz –, which got 29,591 points. But neither of them can compete with Sun's octo-core UltraSPARC T2, which came in with 41,847 points.

There are also current values for SPECjbb2005 Java server benchmarks, but AMD's Opteron does not quite manage to pull away there.

AMD is, however, already optimizing Java on Opterons.

In the TPC-C database benchmarks, current MP-Xeons – X7350 – with a rate of 516,725 transactions per second – IBM System x3850 M2 – are much faster than HP's Opteron 2356 Quartett – 402,234, ProLiant DL585 G5 –, though HP's machine does post a record performance in terms of value for the money among x64 systems with four processors – and it only had half as much RAM – 128 GB – as the IBM Server.

The SAP SD (sales and distribution, 2-tier internet configuration) benchmark for four Opteron 8356s on an Blade-Server HP ProLiant BL685c G5 handled 3524 "users" (PDF), also for all SAP SD results below –, which is roughly the same as four Xeon E7340s – 2.4 GHz – on a BL680c G5 – 3500 users (PDF); faster Xeons leave these two in the dust, such as four Xeon X7350s on an HP ProLiant DL580 G5 – 3705 users (PDF). With the ProLiant DL785, HP now also has a server with eight Opteron 8356 s that can handle an impressive 5230 users (PDF), though it is hard to compare HP's machine with Xeons for a lack of benchmark values for a current system with eight Xeons. On an x3950 M2 system with 16 Xeon X7350s, IBM says it can serve 10,600 SAP SD users (PDF). In the comparison SAP SD servers with two processors, the Xeons lead the way, with two Xeon E5450s – 3 GHz – handling 2275 users (PDF) and two Opteron 2356s – 2.3 GHz – handling 2102 users (PDF). It is doubtful that the higher clock rates of Opterons will be able to close this gap; after all, there are even faster Xeons, such as the X5460, which managed to handle 2436 users (PDF) in these benchmarks.

Vendors have yet to publish SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmarks for energy efficiency for quadcore Opterons. Aside from one computer with dual-core Opterons, Xeons completely dominate the list; values for Power6, SPARC and Itanium systems are missing entirely.

(trk)