We've got a new article up, getting under the skin of the new AMD Opteron Barcelona core server processors and pitting them against an older Xeon chip, to see whether AMD have loaded their guns with the ammo required to put some holes in the up-till-recently impenetrable armour of Intel.
Good article! Its a shame really, that AMD can't get their act together. Haven't seen anything like this before... from top performer to an absolute mess in months... that's how long it took... or rather from Athlon to Core2 as a logical upgrade step... in no time at all.
I'm not an Intel's adept, nor AMD's, so I will say the vision of someone who uses and has experience with both platforms.
First of all, the test isn't very accurate because the processors are priced differently and also are clocked at different speeds. And buying a CPU from Ebay isn't the way companies do.
Let's move on. Applications. Traditionally, AMD Opterons are very good at FP instructions. They do this much better than Xeons. FP instructions are the base of a lot of applications, starting from banks and financial institutions and going all the way to research centres and supercomputers. These environments benefit a lot from using Opterons. Xeons, on the other hand, are better in other tasks (some sort of all rounders), so they are better used in management applications. All this works like: Opterons do the job, and Xeons manage the process.
Scalability. When moving from 2 to 4 and then to 8 processors, Opteron's total performance grows better than Xeon's. In a multi CPU environment, the agregated speed of a Opteron based cluster is equal or better than of a Xeon cluster (of comparable cost (£) or CPU speed). That's why there are a lot of Opteron based supercomputers.
In this light, I think is not totally true to say that a certain Xeon processor (2.66GHz, £296) is much better than an Opteron (2GHz, £190), because, in real life, there are a few users of a single or dual CPU configs, usually, companies use multi CPU configs, and here Opterons aren't worse than Xeons. More than that, if we would calculate the performance per £1 spent and per GHz, Opterons look much better than Xeons. Also 90% or more of the marked addressed by Xeons and Opterons are companies and data centres. Less than 10% will end up in some enthusiastic PC.
P.S. Let's not forget that Nvidia is pushing CUDA and AMD is pushing CTM technologies, so there might be some interesting movement in high performance computing soon.
Cheers,
Good post and interesting points as I work with these sort of environments.
One of the main points of AMD until now had been the power consumption and heat dissipation which is an important factor in a datacentre environment. Not only now because of the carbon footprint, that has raised awareness of this issue outside of ICT, but because:
a) greater power consumption implies bigger generators and bigger UPS capacity and both imply more plant space (n+1),
b) heat dissipation implies more cooling (n+1 as well) and more cooling requires more power...
there is a delicate balance to be achieved here. Xeons have improved on these issues and AMD hasn't exactly followed suit... floating point is an important side but, to be honest it is more important in research than Banking as a good cluster properly cooled will provide the same level of service with lower operational costs (in research as well to be honest)...
... and I had AMDs in the past and I am not a fanboy for any company as well
...sorry shouldn't laugh 
they better put their act together soon...
. But you're right 
, just a shame the competition is dwindling.
to the forums 
