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  • duploxxx - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    your virtualisation life was very short, perhaps marketing can keep you alive for a while since on paper you are better with the amount of cores.

    your 24 cores @2,66ghz are just killed by 16cores @2,7ghz

    http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html">http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html
  • synergyek - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link

    Why only testing scanline render? It's a slow and old monster. Can you add mental ray render to your tests or, maybe, vray, which is used in arch. visualizations? Also you can use Maya 32/64-bit (software, hardware, mental ray tests) for both windows and linux platforms. Mental ray on Vray uses all cores available in the system, and results must be much better, than ordinary scanline.
  • duploxxx - Saturday, September 27, 2008 - link

    Nice article, altough in virtualisation with VMmark it was already clear that the new dunnington had more headroom with the additional cores.

    only few remark, since you are talking about a retail price of +25000euro you could at least add for information that there are 8socket barcelona for about 5000euro more that scale again way better then dunnington with its 32 cores. So indeed intel did a step up again after there tigertown was heavy beaten by new barcelona in 4s even in low speed but at a certain cost of platform, afterall this dunnington is not cheap. it will be the question what a 4s shangai @3.0 ghz will do against this 6 core giant, afterall it is a huge die and the shangai will be way cheaper and consume less.

    lets hope you update this nice article with the soon to be released shangai.
  • Sirlach - Friday, September 26, 2008 - link

    From my research when the hex cores were announced the super micro boards came with an x16 slot. Is it possible to see how CPU restricted multithreaded games perform on this monster? Since it is running server 2008 this is theoretically possible!
  • BaronMatrix - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link

    It seems like a better comparison would be with the number of cores the same. You could take a 4S and remove one chip and match that against a 2S Dunnington.

    From what I saw, it is nowhere near 50% faster though it has 50% more cores plus 4 times the cache. It looks like Intel may NEVER catch up with Opteron. Shanghai will just increase the difference.

    It's just a shame Hector decided to have a "devalue the brand name" fire-sale or we'd be much closer to Bulldozer and SSE5.
  • trivik12 - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link

    4S has been one market where AMD dominated even after conroe's release. With Tigerton intel chipped away AMD's market share bcos of barcelona issues. with Dunnington Intel has a performance advantage. U dont look at per core performance but overall platform performance. AMD needs to catch up soon bcos with beckton AMD will be behind 8th ball in that market as well.
  • snakeoil - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    intel is cannibalizing nehalem this are desperate measures from a desperate man.
    this is a dead end road, sooner or later intel will have to dump the front side bus,but its evident that intel is not very confident about nehalem and quick path.
    these processor are the last kick of an agonizing technology.
    this is just a souped up old car. nothing more.
  • kingmouf - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Although a good thing for testing, I'm wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems.

    Off-chip activity (coming from signal amplifiers, sensors, external buses etc) results in great power consumption. Actually one should expect it to be a crucial part of the total consumption of a system. In this case, I believe the AMD system has an advantage with the memory controller being incorporated in the processor chip. To one extend this also becomes clear in your testing.

    Comparing the Intel CPUs one may observe that the 6-core part has a huge cache memory that seriously limits the main memory accesses. In the case of the 6VMs, there will also be reduced inter-socket communication. Both result in very serious reductions in off-chip activity, which materialises in a whopping 25% reduction in power usage.

    Therefore I believe that making the benchmarking process more memory intensive, as you point is the real-world scenario, AMD could earn quite a few points there.


    On a more general argument now, I can't stop thinking that chips like the 74xx Xeons are somewhat a waste of transistors. Intel is simply following the "bully" path rather than the "smart" path. I cannot stop thinking what would the results look like if instead of the two extra cores and the huge amount of cache, Intel added a TCP offload engine, a true hardware RAID controller, a block cipher accelerator, a DSP engine or an extra FP processor core (I'm not mentioning a memory controller because someone will pop up and say that they have already done that in the nehalem). All these things - and one could add much more - are integral to any server or HPC system and I believe can offer much more countable results than the two extra cores. Better performance and definitely better power usage. On the other hand, considering the weaknesses of AMD, maybe that is the company that should really get down to it.

    Not long there was a lot of hype of AMD opening up their socket and coherent HyperTransport so that people could actually produce accelerators. What has happened with that? Are there any products on that market? It would be interesting to see some benchmarking with these things. :)
  • JohanAnandtech - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link

    "Im wondering if by making artificially the VMs more processing intensive rather than memory intensive, one is getting a quite wrong idea of the power consumption between the Intel and the AMD systems. "

    You are right that most virtualized workloads (including the OLTP ones) will need a lot more memory *space*, but they are not necessarily more memory intensive. It is good practice for example to use another scheduler to make it more CPU intensive: you are getting more transactions per second on the same machine. It is pretty bad to lose your watts on anything else but transactions.
  • jedz - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    It's pretty obvious that AMD is not competing neck to neck in the server arena with their current opteron offerings because of the fact that they are way behind Intel's, and it's not right to compare the opteron to an intel7460 in terms of performance/watt. Why don't you wait for AMD's Shanghai and then redo this benchmarking process.

    Maybe it will do justice for AMD....
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    I'm sure Johan will rerun tests when Shanghai actually launches. He's been working on creating the virtualization testing scenarios for a while, and with something finally in place testing of future products will not be a problem. The launch of Dunnington just happened to coincide with the time for doing this virtualization article.
  • helldrell666 - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    It seems that inquirer's Charlie demirjian was right after all,Anandtch is a pro INTEL anti AMD sight.It's obvious that their reviews are biased and unfair against AMD.
    Anandtech exists to troll for INTEL...That's it.
  • Loknar - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Years ago the Inquirer accused Anandtech of being pro-AMD. Check out the old Athlon XP articles. I won't let you accuse Anandtech of being biased! This is one of the only smart website in the world, please look in your own backyard before accusing the only ones doing true reporting.
    Anyway.. what is this about AMD vs Intel? We are enthusiastically watching the competitors fighting each other in the most healthy way. Did you buy AMD stocks or - why do you seem to have personal interest in this matter?
    Chill out and enjoy the nice products this competition brings is what I'm saying.
  • whatthehey - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Anyone who ever - EVER - refers to someone form the Inquirer as being "right" is so obviously stupid that you don't even deserve to read articles like this. All you'll do is hurt your tiny little brain trying to fit truth into your world-view where AMD rules, Intel sucks, and Charlie isn't an idiot.

    FWIW, I read this article and didn't feel it was at all Intel biased. We all know that AMD can't compete worth a damn on the desktop, and AnandTech has been one of the few sites that has provided any serious server articles where they have frequently pointed out performance advantages AMD still maintains. Even this article is quite positive for AMD, showing that many IT admins with Opteron servers should be fine for a while yet. If you're buying a new server, Dunnington appears to (finally) take the performance crown for 4S/8S and virtualization servers. I also understand how complex coming up with anything resembling a repeatable virtualization benchmark, so it's nice to see some independent testing that doesn't end up praising blade farms. Not that there's anything wrong with blades... other than the proprietary nature and extremely high costs.
  • socrilles07 - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    I don't get it - instead of using the already released high end AMD processor they used the much lower price point processor for a quite unfair comparison. In the end they make assumptions about what the performance to watt will be in the higher end processor. I thought anandtech was suppose to be THE review site, can you not afford the faster processor? or has AMD stopped providing you samples because of you bias? Lets do Apples to Apples comparisons
  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Add 8% to our 8356 benchmarks and you'll know where the AMD Opteron 8360SE ends up in the best case. It is not that hard.

    From price/performance/Watt point of view, the 8356 is the best offer AMD has right now, and I am sure AMD would sent us another CPU if they felt otherwise.

    We can not buy CPUs at $2000 a piece for each review that we write. If you work with virtualization and other server software, you have an idea how many manhours go in this kind of article. Add $8000 of AMD CPUs, $8000 of Intel CPUs... I hope you understand I don't feel like spending the rest of my time on ebay desperately trying to recoup some of my massive losses of buying server CPUs.
  • socrilles07 - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    you can't buy processors that cost $2000 a piece but some how you manage to get samples of processors costing twice that before they are released......so obviously you are no longer getting samples from AMD for some reason if not you could've done a comparison with at least the high end processor if not the next gen AMD processor which wouldve been more like the anandtech of the past.
  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    "so obviously you are no longer getting samples from AMD for some reason"

    We'll see. :-)
  • helldrell666 - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    What a good INTEL supporting article.But, It is expected from anandetch.Their ATOM review that made ATOM look like the best offering in it's category and their phenom reviews that made the phenom look like a two dual cores on a chip with one disabled.....These days one must take every little thing with a lot of salt.
    Bulldoze.....!!!!
    Anantech reviews of AMD's products are stuffed with false and biased perspectives and numbers.
  • npp - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    Look, we're trying to get some discussion here. If you don't like anandtech and you're convinced that it is biased towards Intel, why do you keep reading it? And if you've expected that a six-core Intel CPU would be slower than an AMD quad-core, you were obvoiusly mistaken, so take a note and give some constructive criticism, if you can.
  • npp - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    I didn't got this one very clear - why should a bigger cache reduce cache syncing traffic? With a bigger cache, you would have the potential risc of one CPU invalidating a larger portion of the data another CPU has already in its own cache, hence there would be more data to move between the sockets at the end. If we exaggerate this, every CPU having a copy of the whole main memory in its own cache would obviously lead to enormous syncing effort, not the oposite.

    I'm not familiar with the cache coherence protocol used by Intel on that platform, but even in the positive scenario of a CPU having data for read-only access in its own cache, a request from another CPU for the same data (the chance for this being bigger given the large cache size) may again lead to increased inter-socket communication, since these data won't be fetched from main memory again.

    In all cases, inter-socket communication should be much cheaper than the cost of a main memory access, and it shifts the balance in the right direction - avoiding main memory as long as possible. And now it's clear why Dunnington is a six- rather than eight-core - more cores and less cache would yield a shift in the entirely opposite direction, which isn't what Intel is needing until QPI arrives.

  • narlzac85 - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    In the best case scenario (I hope the system is smart enough to do it this way), with each VM having 4 CPU cores, they can keep all their threads on one physical die. This means that all 4 cores are working on the same VM/data and should need minimal access to data that another die has changed (if the hypervisor/hostOS processes jump around from core to core would be about it). The inter-socket cache coherency traffic will go down (in the older quad cores, since the 2 physical dual cores have to communicate over the FSB, it might as well have been the same as an 8 socket system populated by dual cores)
  • Nyceis - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    Can we post here now? :)
  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Indeed. As the IT forums gave quite a few times trouble and we assume quite a few people do not comment in the IT forums as they have to register again. I am still searching for a good solution as these "comment boxes" get messy really quickly.
  • Nyceis - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    PS - Awesome article - makes me want hex-cores rather than quads in my Xen Servers :)
  • Nyceis - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    Looks like it :)
  • erikejw - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    Great article as always.
    However the performance / watt comparison is quite useless for virtualization systems though since they scale well at a multisystem level and for other reasons too

    I won't hurt to make them but what users really care of is performance / dollar (for a lifetime)

    Say the system will be in use for 3 years.
    That makes the total powerbill for a 600W system about 2000$, less then the cost of one Dunnington and since the price difference between the Opteron and Dunnington cpus is like 4800$ you gotta be pretty ignorant to choose system with the performance / watt cost.

    Lets say the AMD system costs 10000$ and the Intel 14800$(will be more due to Dimm differences) and have a 3 year life then the total cost for the systems and power will be 12000 and 16800.

    That leaves us with a real basecost/transaction ratio of

    Intel 5.09 : 4.25 AMD

    AMD is hence 20% more cost effective than Intel in this case.


    Any knowledgable buyer has to look at the whole picture and not at just one cost factor.

    I hope that you include this in your other virtualization articles.

  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    You are right, the best way to do this is work with TCO. We have done that in our Sun fir x4450 article. And the feedback I got was to calculate on 5 years, because that was more realistic.

    But for the rest I fully agree with you. Will do asap. How did you calculate the power bill?
  • erikejw - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Sounds good, will be interesting.

    The calculations was just a quick and dirty 600W 24/7 for 3 years and using current power prices.

    VM servers are supposed to run like that.

    It would also be interesting to see how the Dunnington responds when using more virtual cores than physical. Will the decline be less than the older Xeons?

    What is a typical (core)load when it comes to this?

    The Nehalems will respond more like the Athlons in this regard and not loose as much when the load increases, at a higher level than AMD though.

    I realised the other day that it seems as AMD have built a servercpu that they take the best of and brings to the desktop market and Intel have done it the other way around.

    The Nehalems architechture seems more "serverlike" but will make a bang on the desktop side too.

  • kingmouf - Thursday, September 25, 2008 - link

    I think this is because they have (or should I say had) a different CPU that they wanted to cover that space, the Itanium. But now they are fully concentrated to x86, so...
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - link

    Heh... that's why I love the current IBM commercials.

    "How much will this save us?"
    "It will reduce our power bills by up to 40%."
    "How much did we spend on power?"
    "Millions."
    [Cue happy music....]

    What they neglect to tell you is that in order to achieve the millions of dollars in energy savings, you'll need to spend billions on hardware upgrades first. They also don't tell you whether the new servers are even faster (it's presumed, but that may not be true). Even if your AC costs double the power bills for a server, you're still only looking at something like $800 per year per server, and the server upgrades cost about 20 times as much every three to five years.

    Now, if reduced power requirements on new servers mean you can fit more into your current datacenter, thus avoiding costly expansion or remodeling, that can be a real benefit. There are certainly companies that look at density as the primary consideration. There's a lot more to it than just performance, power, and price. (Support and service comes to mind....)
  • Loknar - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    Not sure what you mean: "reduced power requirements means you can fit more into your DC". You can fill your slots regardless of power, unless I'm missing something.

    Anyway I agree that power requirement is the last thing we consider when populating our servers. It's good to save the environment, that's all. I don't know about other companies, but for critical servers, we buy the most performing systems, with complete disregard of the price and power consumption; because the cost of DC rental, operation (say, a technician earns more than 2000$ per year, right?) and benefits of performance will outweigh everything. So we're so happy AMD and Intel have such a fruitful competition. (And any respectable IT company is not fooled by IBM's commercial! We only buy OEM (Dell in my case) for their fast 24-hour replacement part service and worry free feeling).
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - link

    I mean that if your DC has a total power and cooling capacity of say 100,000W, you can "only" fit 2000 500W servers in there, or you could fit 4000 250W servers. If you're renting rack space, this isn't a concern - it's only a concern for the owners of the data center itself.

    I worked at a DC for a while for a huge corporation, and I often laughed (or cried) at some of their decisions. At one point the head IT people put in 20 new servers. Why? Because they wanted to! Two of those went into production after a couple months, and the remainder sat around waiting to be used - plugged in, using power, but doing no actual processing of any data. (They had to use up the budget, naturally. Never mind that the techs working at the DC only got a 3% raise and were earning less than $18 per hour; let's go spend $500K on new servers that we don't need!)

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