Intel's newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP's DL585 Quad Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on November 10, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Introduction
There has been a relentless assault on the Server CPU market. How else could you describe Intel's impressive amount of new server CPU launches, and aggressive pricing during the past several months? At the end of May 2006, Intel released the dual core Xeon DP 5080 "Dempsey" at 3.73 GHz, still based on the same architecture as the latest Pentium 4 ("Presler"). As shown by the Dell DVD store benchmark, Dempsey made the performance gap with the best AMD Opterons smaller, but it still wasn't very competitive in the performance/Watt league.
Only one month later, we reviewed a new Xeon DP 5160 based on the Intel's brand spanking new Core architecture, codenamed Woodcrest. With the exception of SSL Encryption and the MySQL database tests, the new Xeon DP simply annihilated the competition. Our most recent data shows that the Xeon 5160 outperforms the best Opteron (2.8 GHz) by 10% (MySQL) to 60% (LAMP), while presenting 33% lower TDP numbers (80W versus 119W, 65W versus 95W). AMD launched the new Socket F in August, but the current Opterons are not capable of extracting higher performance out of the faster DDR2 DIMMs, leaving AMD no other option than severely reducing the price of their server CPU flagship in the dual socket market.
The Xeon MP machine on top of the HP DL585 in our rack...
but can it really overpower the quad Opteron?
But Intel wasn't satisfied. The lucrative 4 socket market was and is still dominated by the 8xx Opteron, which managed to capture up to 50% of the market share in only a few years. In September the 3.4 GHz Xeon MP 7140M, codename Tulsa, was born. With up to 16 MB of L3-cache, can the new Xeon MP stop AMD's Quad Opteron from grabbing even more market share? Or do we have to wait for Tigerton to arrive? Let us find out....
There has been a relentless assault on the Server CPU market. How else could you describe Intel's impressive amount of new server CPU launches, and aggressive pricing during the past several months? At the end of May 2006, Intel released the dual core Xeon DP 5080 "Dempsey" at 3.73 GHz, still based on the same architecture as the latest Pentium 4 ("Presler"). As shown by the Dell DVD store benchmark, Dempsey made the performance gap with the best AMD Opterons smaller, but it still wasn't very competitive in the performance/Watt league.
Only one month later, we reviewed a new Xeon DP 5160 based on the Intel's brand spanking new Core architecture, codenamed Woodcrest. With the exception of SSL Encryption and the MySQL database tests, the new Xeon DP simply annihilated the competition. Our most recent data shows that the Xeon 5160 outperforms the best Opteron (2.8 GHz) by 10% (MySQL) to 60% (LAMP), while presenting 33% lower TDP numbers (80W versus 119W, 65W versus 95W). AMD launched the new Socket F in August, but the current Opterons are not capable of extracting higher performance out of the faster DDR2 DIMMs, leaving AMD no other option than severely reducing the price of their server CPU flagship in the dual socket market.
The Xeon MP machine on top of the HP DL585 in our rack...
but can it really overpower the quad Opteron?
But Intel wasn't satisfied. The lucrative 4 socket market was and is still dominated by the 8xx Opteron, which managed to capture up to 50% of the market share in only a few years. In September the 3.4 GHz Xeon MP 7140M, codename Tulsa, was born. With up to 16 MB of L3-cache, can the new Xeon MP stop AMD's Quad Opteron from grabbing even more market share? Or do we have to wait for Tigerton to arrive? Let us find out....
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Niv KA - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
I belive Clovertown is going to be announced somethime in the next week or two. On thursday I went to the "Microsoft: Ready for a New Day" here in Belgium (where Bill gates made an appearance of about half an hour, although not related!) and at the Intel booth they were showing off 4 servers which where running an "unannounced platform"! One of the technical guys at the booth let me in on a little "secret"! The Supermicro Systems were running "two sockets each box, each socket 4 cores! Eight cores each box! And the best part is its woodcrest arch!". I asked him if it was clovertown and he sayed that he "is just a technical assistant, not alowed to say anything" but he made the answer clear on his face! Clovertown is ready to go, and its FAST! They were running benchmarks all the time! I will post pictures on the fourms if I have enough time, but I have a HUGE project I need to hand in by tuesday so I might forget!
---Niv K Aharonovich
PS: About the "outdated" system comments above, I am fully on Anandtechs side, it is impossible for an online newspaper company to make enough money to BUY everything, esp. in the $15,000 area! The only way is to ask for it from the vendors, and the vendors decide what to provide! Good job anandtech and continue the good work!!!!!!!
Dennis Travis - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Great job as usuall. Keep up the excellent work.AnandThenMan - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Another bullshit "comparison" nice job guys. You are comparing an AMD system that has been out for over 2 years. Useless review as usual. Why are you not comparing new with new? Why don't you use a Xeon box that was out 2 years ago?Anandtech's reviews have become more and more worthless.
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
1. AMD has confirmed that they feel the HP DL585 with 4x 880 is a worthy competitor for our Tulsa machine.2. This server is 5 months old, not 2 years. As I made clear in the article, this is the 2006 revision.
As we invest a lot of time of effort to convince OEMs and others to send us extremely expensive hardware for review, spend weeks tweaking benchmarks and OS to give you benchmarks, we hope we may expect some useful feedback from our readers.
Just writing "useless" with little or no explanation why you feel it is worthless is not helping anyone.
AnandThenMan - Sunday, November 12, 2006 - link
I was going to post an explanation as to why the "review" is very poorly done. But Scientia over at AMDz did a far better explanation then I could come up with.http://www.amdzone.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&...">http://www.amdzone.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&...
Either the review is intentionally authored to show Intel in as best light as possible, or the author is incompetent and should not be doing reviews at all. I stand by what I originally posted, the review is bullshit.
primer - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Agreed.goldfish2 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Can I just quickly mention how nice it is to read an article where the author has managed to present all the relevant informatiom in as concise a manner as is possible, good job.JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Thanks!Server reviews are extremely time consuming so most publications are not interested in it, so I am glad AT allows me to do this kind of reviews.
AllYourBaseAreBelong2Us - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Can you guys get a new DL585 G2 and do benchmarks with this new model instead?Viditor - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
I thought this too...the G2 has 7 PCIe slots (3 x8, 4 x4), is $800 less expensive, and offers newer SCSI controllers.