6Gbps SATA Performance: AMD 890GX vs. Intel X58/P55
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Random Read Performance is Also Affected
It’s not all about peak bandwidth either. Remember that bandwidth and latency are related, so it’s not all too surprising that the setups that delivered the least amount of bandwidth, also hurt small file read speed.
The target here is around 80MB/s. That’s what Intel’s X58 can do off one of its native 3Gbps SATA ports. Let’s see how everything else fares:
At 80MB/s the Crucial RealSSD C300 is pushing roughly 20,000 IOPS in this test. The highest random read speed of any MLC SSD we’ve ever tested in fact. With the 890GX the C300 can only manage 64.3MB/s.
Naturally I shared my data with AMD before publishing, including my Iometer test scripts. Running on its internal 890GX test platform, AMD was able to achieve a 4KB random read speed of 102.6MB/s in this test - faster than anything I’d ever tested. Unfortunately that appears to be using AMD’s own internal reference board and not one of the publicly available 890GX platforms. The good news is that if AMD’s numbers are accurate, there is hope for 890GX’s SATA performance. It’s just a matter of getting the 3rd party boards up to speed (AMD has since shared some more results with me that show performance with some beta BIOSes on 3rd party boards improving even more).
Using the Marvell 6Gbps controller in any PCIe 2.0 slot (or off a PCIe 2.0 interface as is the case with Gigabyte’s X58), or in one of ASUS’ 6Gbps ports behind the PLX switch, yields peak performance more or less.
Any of the PCIe 1.0 slots however saw a drop from ~80MB/s to ~65MB/s. The exception being Intel’s odd x4 slot that is a PCIe 1.0 slot, but branches off the X58 IOH and thus appears to offer lower latency than PCIe 1.0 slots dangling off the ICH.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
sparkuss - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Anand,I was going to maybe get two C300's for my current build. Do we consumers need to wait for your update before we invest in these?
We know it died, but I haven't been able to find any other reliability statistics collated anywhere to make a buying decision on.
sparkuss - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Sorry, I missed the Update link in the upper corner.vol7ron - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Great review. Not much to be said. There was a little bit of puffery at the end, in AMDs favor.I'm sure most companies have faster controllers/BIOSs to be released. Rather than saying AMD is something to look out for, for some reason I'd think Intel would have something greater.
As you mentioned, the on-die controller should have lower latencies - could you ask them about this? Perhaps some of the PCI bandwidth is being chewed up by something else, or perhaps the latencies are too low, causing a check/repeat bottleneck? (or maybe this a marketing ploy to release something faster in the future)
Dzban - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Because AMD has native 6Gbps and they are improving drivers. With intel chipsets you can't phisicly increase speed further.vol7ron - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I don't like how Intel switches between [Mb/s & Gb/s] and [MB/s & GB/s]. It'd be nicer to not have to translate 480Mbps into 60MB.I guess the issue was at first past I almost equated the 480Mb/s to the 500MB/s right under it.
jejeahdh - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
You should not type dates in that format, and if you had an editor, he or she should absolutely stop you from doing such things. People have expectations. You might think it's no worse than the ever-present traditional ambiguous formats of the US and Europe (m/d/yy(yy), d/m/yy(yy)) which are bad enough, but at least it's an old and well recognized problem that people are used to living with, so long as it uses slashes. People with knowledge of standards, though, use dashes for ISO date format, yyyy-mm-dd which is also perfectly sortable. By mixing and matching styles haphazardly, you're only propagating the notion that anything goes, causing people to stop and wonder for 12 days out of every month. If you're deliberately adopting the style commonly used in the Netherlands (I had to look it up) and advocating its use for an international audience, I cannot imagine why.I know it seems crazy to harp on this and I kind of agree . . . but I am just so surprised to see it here, written by a detail oriented technically minded accomplished writer.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
If this is in response to the IOMeter build, that might be the way it was named by its creator, not Anand. Also, I would imagine 6-22-2008 is m-dd-yyyyassassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hey Anand, Why isn't the X-58 gigabyte native 6gbs board on the write benchmarks?assassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
never mind I read why, legacy modevailr - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Intel releases SSD friendly AHCI/RAID driver:http://www.pcper.com/#NewsID-8538">http://www.pcper.com/#NewsID-8538