This article is more than 1 year old

Opteron zings through server benchmarks

Xeon pressure

Bored with Opteron yet? The best has yet to come.

Ace's Hardware has been putting the new 64bit processor through its paces with Windows 2000, SuSE and Debian flavors of Linux in a head-to-head with Intel's Xeon processor. And the results are intriguing.

Although Intel's venerable Xeon holds the edge in workstation performance, in the server tests AMD's chip wins eight out of twelve head-to-head comparisons. Excluding Microsoft SQL benchmarks, it wins 8:1. Which in footballing terms, would be considered a "heavy defeat", with home supporters calling for the manager's head.

However, this is early days, concludes Ace's:-

"The introduction of a NUMA aware, 64bit OS, better compilers, and 64bit drivers should all boost performance. And there is no reason to believe that AMD will be limited to 1.8 GHz this year. Once the circuit engineers get the knack of SOI circuitry design, and there are reports showing that they already have, they should be able to get a lot more clockspeed out of the Opteron than they have out of the Athlon. The slightly longer but more balanced pipeline and SOI should take care of that and push the Opteron past 2.2 GHz and more."

We note that none of the benchmarks use more than 2GB of memory, and the large address space offered by 64 bittyness is one of Opteron's selling points.

You can read the results here. AMD has its own benchmarks here

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