[Leaplist] AnandTech on latest LGA-771 Xeon Quad-Core DDR2 v. "old" S940 Opteron Dual-Core DDR ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

[ Since this covers SSL and MySQL benchmarks, I'll post to LEAPLIST ]

AnandTech took an "old" 2.4GHz Opteron dual-core from the Socket-940
era with only DDR333 (PC2700), and _not_ the newer LGA-1207 (Socket-F)
Opteron with DDR2, and pitted it against the latest'n greatest LGA-771
Quad-Core Xeon monster from Intel with 8MB L3 cache.

Once again, *ABSOLUTELY*NO*I/O* benchmarking was done.  That removes
the overwhelming majority of Opteron's advantage -- it's partial mesh
interconnect (well beyond "switched," let alone Intel's "bus").  So
this was 100% computational and memory interconnect testing -- and the
memory affinity (especially for memory mapped I/O) was largely gone
for Opteron as well.

Anand even threw the -O3 switch to ultra-optimize Intel with its
inprecise lossy math SSE units over the Opteron's precise FPU
operations (which it also uses for SSE).  So Intel Core should blow
Opteron away at SSL and MySQL, right?

*WRONG*!

The Opteron still _trounces_ Intel at SSL, handily!  I was a bit
surprised there.  I thought Intel's inprecise, lossy math SSE pipes
would boost it.  Maybe the -O3 switch does not use Intel's SSE pipes
as liberally as I thought it did -- or the GCC team changed the
optimization (because of all the data loss due to doing so for 64-bit
FP operations reported in the past)?  I'll have to research this a bit
more.

At MySQL operations, they were the same MHz for MHz, although Intel
has the 800MHz lead at 3.2GHz to only 2.4GHz.  Intel will offer up to
3.4GHz in the initial offering, while AMD does offer the newer
LGA-1027 (Socket-F) in up to 2.8GHz.

Pricing is not too much more for Intel's solution.  But considering
the SSL performance, why would you buy it?  I'd also like to see a
well-designed I/O solution pushing the data for the SQL tables --
something you could seriously tip in design in Opteron's favor even
more.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2872


-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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