I left the office yesterday at 5:00, headed to the trail for my weekly ride.  Because of the recent rain, we shifted to City Park, one of the most technical mountain bike trails in Austin. If you just looked at us and our bikes in the parking lot, you’d notice that the older guy with the borrowed bike (because I finally broke my frame after 4 years) would probably not fare well against better riders, younger riders or newer bikes.

But looks can be deceiving. While I didn’t have the flashy skills or the newest ride, I did have a dedication and a lack of technical problems that actually allowed me to finish the ride ahead of others. Sometimes the outcome isn’t always as obvious.

Too many people get caught up in the benchmarks and think that is the end of the story. Benchmarks can be important as an indicator, but they don’t tell the whole story.  As a matter of fact, they really only tell a portion of PART of the story.  In my opinion, making a decision based on benchmark alone is like buying a car because you like the color.  That is great if all you care about is a red car, but so few of us really think that way in the real world.

One of the things that I have been telling customers is that they need to step out of the “socket” world and start thinking more about the work that needs to get done when assessing the platforms. Sometimes the answer is not obvious.

The non-obvious thread for today started this morning when I went to check out the latest review on AnandTech.com of the AMD Opteron processor vs. our competitor’s processor (which my colleague Margaret Lewis also discusses here).  We sent them a review system recently and during their testing, they came up with some interesting comments.

Comparing a 2 socket Intel server to a 4 socket AMD server, you start to see that if you step outside of the raw performance area, there are plenty of other places to be looking, like threading and efficiency, not just clock speed. Here is what AnandTech had to say when comparing our six-core 2435 to a higher clock speed quad core:

“If your application scales well, two 2.6GHz Opteron 2435 will offer 15% better (and sometimes more) performance than a 2.9GHz Opteron 2389 with the same power consumption.”

More performance, at the same power envelope and lower clock speed.  Not always the most obvious answer, but clearly a great choice for threaded applications. (And don’t think that applications will be less threaded in the future.) Memory is another area less than obvious. Here is what AnandTech had to say:

“Using relatively ‘old’ technology such as DDR2, the hex-core Opteron based servers are very affordable, especially if you compare them with similar Xeon servers.”

Yeah, I was the old guy on the trail, but that didn’t mean I was the last.  I can think of a couple of younger guys finishing after me – so sometimes “newer” doesn’t me “better”.  Again, not the obvious answer, but until the prices of DDR-3 come in line with DDR-2, this is our secret weapon.  And in a tough economy, who doesn’t want to be smart with their IT budgets.

We have tremendous consistency, but people expect that.  And they expect that all processors in the family will have the same features.  That is obvious, right?  Here’s how AnandTech saw it.

“If you chose the Xeon platform, you should be aware of the fact that Intel’s low end is much less interesting: the best Xeon 55xx CPUs have a clock speed between 2.26 and 2.93GHz. The low end models, the 5504 and 5506 are pretty crippled, with no Hyper-Threading, no Turbo Boost, and only half as much L3 cache (4MB). These crippled CPUs can keep up with the quad-core Opterons at about 2.5GHz, but they are the worst Xeons when you look at idle and full load power. The performance per Watt of the Xeon EE550x is pretty bad compared to the more expensive parts.”

You’ve heard me talk a lot about “no compromises” in our products, and this is what we are talking about.  Just because you can’t afford to buy the most expensive processor in the stack shouldn’t mean that you have to compromise so much.  Cutting the cache in half?  That is not obvious to the typical customer. 

When you step back and take a look at all of this in full, you see what was obvious before – 2P servers are the best value for most workloads – is becoming somewhat less obvious. And as we get into 2010, the value that AMD will bring to market will blur the lines even more. It’s time to stop looking at the world of sockets and start looking at the workload, the power consumption and the cost.  Only then, does everything become obvious. 

Otherwise you’ll just be like that young guy tonight, standing on the trail as the old guy blew past him.  Sometimes the obvious answer isn’t always the only answer.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.