What Intel and AMD are Offering
Before we can dive into benchmarks, it is good to see how the vendors position their CPUs. Before we do that, a quick specsheet of the most important AMD and Intel CPUs.
| Model | Speed (GHz) | Max. clock 4 cores busy (GHz) | L2 Cache (KB) | L3 Cache (MB) | Interconnect Bandwidth in One Direction |
| Intel Xeon X5570 | 2.93 | 3.2 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 12.3 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon X5560 | 2.80 | 3.066 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 12.3 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon X5550 | 2.66 | 2.93 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 12.3 GB/s |
| AMD Opteron 2435 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 6 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 9.8 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon E5540 | 2.53 | 2.66 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 11.7 GB/s |
| AMD Opteron 2431 | 2.4 | 2.4 | 6 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 8.8 GB/s |
| AMD Opteron 2389 | 2.9 | 2.9 | 4 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 8.8 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon E5530 | 2.4 | 2.53 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 11.7 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon E5430 | 2.66 | 2.66 | 2 x 6 MB | N/A | Via FSB |
| AMD Opteron 2427 | 2.2 | 2.2 | 6 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 8.8 GB/s |
| AMD Opteron 2384 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 6 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 4 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon E5520 | 2.26 | 2.33 | 4 x 256 KB | 8 MB | 11.7 GB/s |
| Intel Xeon E5506 | 2.13 | 2.13 | 4 x 256 KB | 4MB | 9.8 GB/s |
| AMD Opteron 2378 | 2.4 | 2.4 | 4 x 512 KB | 6 MB | 4 GB/s |
What do you get for your money? The six-cores of AMD are shown in “forest green”.
| Intel Xeon Model | Speed (GHz) / TDP | Price | AMD Opteron Model | Speed (GHz) / TDP - ACP | Price |
| X5570 | 2.93 / 95W | $1386 | |||
| X5560 | 2.80 x 95W | $1172 | |||
| X5550 | 2.66 / 95W | $958 | 2435 | 2.6 / 75-115W | $989 |
| E5540 | 2.53 / 80W | $744 | 2431 | 2.4 / 75-115W | $698 |
| 2389 | 2.9 / 75-115W | $698 | |||
| E5530 | 2.4 / 80W | $530 | 2387 | 2.8 / 75-115W | $523 |
| L5520 | 2.26 / 60W | $530 | 2376 HE | 2.3 / 55-79W | $575 |
| L5510 | 2.13 / 60W | $423 | 2374 HE | 2.2 / 55-79W | $450 |
| E5520 | 2.26 | $373 | 2427 | 2.2 / 75-115W | $455 |
| E5506 | 2.13 | $266 | 2382 | 2.6 / 75-115W | $316 |
| E5504 | 2.00 | $224 | |||
| E5502 | 1.86 | $188 | 2378 | 2.4 / 75-115W | $174 |
AMD has clearly recognized that it can not beat the best Xeon X55xx when it comes to raw performance. The two top models, the X5570 and X5560 stay out of reach. AMD is basically saying that – with the right application – the new six-core Opteron should be able to keep up with equally clocked Xeons X55xx. In case of the 2435, you get lower power consumption as a bonus. Notice also that the best quad-core Opterons have become significantly cheaper. The 2.9 GHz 2389 “Shanghai”, which used to be positioned against the 2.66 GHz X5550 is now competing with the E5540. The 2.9 GHz Shanghai is still no match for the Xeon E5540 2.53 but it is important to look at the complete server price. 32 GB of reg DDR-3 1066 still costs about $1200, whereas 32 GB of DDR-2 800 costs around $850. It is out of the scope of this article, but it is clear that even if the CPUs cost the same, the AMD based server will be less costly. The Xeon X55xx is after all a very new platform.
For those who love stats, the die size and transistor count table:
| CPU | Transitor Count (Million) | Process | Die Size | Cores |
| Intel Dunnington (Xeon 74xx) | 1900 | 45 nm | 504 mm2 | 6 |
| Intel Gainestown (Xeon 55xx) | 731 | 45 nm | 265 mm2 | 4 |
| AMD Istanbul (Opteron 24xx) | 904 | 45 nm | 346 mm2 | 6 |
| AMD Shanghai (Opteron >237x) | 705 | 45 nm | 263 mm2 | 4 |
| AMD Barcelona (Opteron 23xx) | 463 | 65 nm | 283 mm2 | 4 |
| Intel Tigerton (Xeon 73xx) | 2 x 291 = 582 | 65 nm | 2 x 143 mm2 | 4 |
| Intel Harpertown (Xeon 54xx) | 2 x 410 = 820 | 45 nm | 2 x 107 mm2 | 4 |
AMD’s Istanbul is quite a large chip, but not as expensive as “Barcelona” to produce. The champion is the Harpertown when it comes to the lowest production costs.
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iocedmyself - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 - link
Well something that was failed to be mentioned was that the 2P opteron machine costs about $6700, where as the nehalem 2p machine is very near to $16,000.as for power consumption a straight up comparison would be HP380 Xeon and HP 385 Opteron. At idle, both are 140W. With 100% CPU / Ram, 385 is around 300W, 380 (Xeon) is about 450W.
another thing not discussed here - 4P Istanbul is 70-80% faster than 2P Nehalem, and there is no 4P Nehalem. 8P Istanbul is over 3 times as fast as 2P Nehalem. so until next gen Nehalem, there is no competition in the high end which probably has something to do with istanbul orders being through the roof.
I also have to wonder if these benchmarks were conducted using one of Intel's little helpful optimized compilers.
yasbane - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
would be nice to see some unix or linux benchmarks...riskyburden - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - link
I might be naive here but surely the majority of these applications are favouring clock speed and no more than two cores, should there not be a bench for those companies that run multiple apps such as SQL and AD or IPFX etc all from one server and make a comparison there. I don't suggest it to be good network practice but that would interest me more.mino - Friday, June 5, 2009 - link
For this part of SMB market pretty much any dual core CPU will do.Their bottleneck is almost allways on the storage side, sometimes with insufficient memory.
And most also run default install where basic SW tweaks would make 100's percents in performance.
befair - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Johan never proves me wrong. Even an article meant to talk about AMD Opteron starts with a good deal of "Intel is the king!" stuff, as usual.alpha754293 - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
What happened to them?I would have to loved to have seen what the new 6-core AMDs would be able to do in this arena since it is (presumably) a much more competitive offering than the fastest Xeons all around.
lopri - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
A Question: Is the 'snoop-filter' a hardware-based? I read that it can be enabled/disabled via BIOS, and since the cores are same as Shanghai cores.. But my question is, whether it's hardware-based or software-based (BIOS), shouldn't this work for inter-core communication as well if AMD decides to implement it?JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
I have to check, but I am pretty sure it is both. The "uncore" part has changed somewhat on Istanbul."shouldn't this work for inter-core communication as well if AMD decides to implement it"
Since the L3-cache keeps copies of shared L2-cachelines, I don't think that will help. There is already a very fast way of communicating with little overhead.
tygrus - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
I would like to know the performance difference when using a cell size of 3 not 6 on the 6-core units or of 8 not 4 on Xeon 4Core8Thread ?Will have to wait for latter for more raw performance numbers (eg. memory local/system, SPEC CPU, task switching, OS/IO task servicing).
How long before they update the boards for DDR3 based memory and better IO onboard ?
It's a pity the ESX 4.0 update hasn't helped AMD .. are the improvements only available for Intel or was it to correct a previous Intel only problem ? What can AMD/partners do to improve performance ?
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
"I would like to know the performance difference when using a cell size of 3 not 6 on the 6-core units?"A cell size of 3 will not do any good if your VMs are MP. Eventhough ESX features "relaxed co-scheduling", there might quite a few cases where the Scheduler is not able to use all "slots" as some of vCPUs of the VMs might be behind. From the momemt you use more than 2 vCPUs, you will get situations where only one VM with 2 CPUs is scheduled on a cell of 3 CPUs. 8-cell: I have to try it.
"How long before they update the boards for DDR3 based memory and better IO onboard ? "
The AMD's Fiorano platform that will be available in a few weeks should have better I/O (PCIe gen 2) but will still be DDR-2 based.
DDR-3 CPUs are scheduled for 2010.
"It's a pity the ESX 4.0 update hasn't helped AMD .. are the improvements only available for Intel or was it to correct a previous Intel only problem ? "
VMware's docs tell us they that CPU locking goes more quickly and that the scheduler is "cache aware", but most of the biggest improvements are EPT and better support for Hyperthreading.