New quad core server CPUs: AMD Barcelona vs. Intel Harpertown

graigchq

One really important forctor that seems to have been omitted from the benchamrking results, is this...

The two intel CPU's are running at 2.67ghz and 3.0 ghz respectively for clovertown and harpertown, the barcelona however is runnign at 2.0ghz.

If scalability is clean and as reliable as previous generations of opterons, then it realyl will wipe the floor with the harpertown CPUs.

Would it not have been better to include some clock for clock tests? as this is what Intel has been banging on about for so long, that for the first time they have been able to beat AMD clock for clock, where K8 had the Pentium 4s beat clock for clock for many years before that.

I personally think that the review doesnt really address these issues, despite soem really good info on the hardware changes and architecture modifications, a mere mention that these tests were conducted with the intel CPU running 50% faster clock, would explain the less than 30% better performance in each test, and the fact that the intel system had 200% the amount of memory that the AMD one did, i think once we see some like for like comparisons, Intel has its work cut out for it once again.

GO the boys in green!!!!

smoked_trout

Hi,
I am the programmer who wrote FlamMap/FSPro.

I believe the reason the barcelonas did not fare so well in the benchmark is becauseI believe the version of FlamMap you have contains Intel compiler optimizations built around the first of the year. I think there's cpu identification code in there that disables SSE with thebarcelonas and reverts back to standard floating point code.

I am also concerned about the size of the benchmark dataset really only testing cache and not testing the memory system enough.

I am in the process of producing a command-line version for benchmarking. I am also trying to produce a dataset of sufficient size that will test the entire system (bypass any cache bias) so results are useful for real world comparison.

Please contact me if you are interested in the new benchmark. I'd also like to verify performance on barcelona systems.

stubrittainATgmail.com

Thanks.