As my colleague John Fruehe referred to in his most recent blog, the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors  have now arrived! In reality, our customers have been evaluating and purchasing these processors under NDA for the last several months, now we can comment publicly about the performance, value, and consistency that these processors (and the servers using these processors) deliver.

As a part of the launch activities for these new processors, we’ve added over 40 new benchmark pages to www.amd.com/opteronperformance.

To view them all, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:          AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                            Select all Power Bands

• Workload/Applications:              Select all Workloads/Applications

1. Servers using AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6174 (12-core 2.2GHz) have higher SPECint®_rate2006 and SPECfp®_rate2006 performance (at a lower processor price) than servers using Intel Xeon processor Model X5680 (6-core 3.33GHz)

       a. AMD also offers an even higher performance AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6176 SE (12-core 2.3GHz), but these SE processors aren’t necessary to out perform a server using Intel Xeon processor Model X5680 (6-core 3.33GHz) on these benchmarks.

       b. Also note that Intel Xeon processor Model X5680 (6-core 3.33GHz) has a TDP of 130W, which is significantly higher than the 95W TDP of the prior generation Intel Xeon processor Model X5570 (4-core 2.93GHz).

       c. Finally, the Intel Xeon processor Model X5680 (6-core 3.33GHz) is priced 42% higher than the AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6174 (12-core 2.2GHz)¹. As John so eloquently put it in his blog, Intel’s customers are “paying 42% more money for the luxury of purchasing a slower processor.”

2. Servers using AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6136 (8-core 2.4GHz) have higher SPECint®_rate2006 and SPECfp®_rate2006 performance (at a lower processor price) than servers using Intel Xeon processor Model X5570 (4-core 2.93GHz).

To view these charts, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:        AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                          Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:            Floating Point Throughput Performance and Integer Throughput Performance

Click on SPECint®_rate2006 – Two-Socket Servers (including AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor) and Click on SPECfp®_rate2006 – Two-Socket Servers (including AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor)

3. Value Four-Socket Servers using four AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6136 (8-core 2.4GHz) have higher SPECint®_rate2006 and SPECfp®_rate2006 performance (at a lower total processor price) than servers using two Intel Xeon processors Model X5680 (6-core 3.33GHz).

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:           AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                             Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:               Performance Summary

Click on “Performance Summary – Value Four-Socket Servers vs. Two-Socket Server”

4. In similarly configured servers, the server using low-power AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6164 HE (12-core 1.7GHz) consumes up to 8 percent less power at Active Idle than the server using low-power Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2425 HE.

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:           AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                             HE/EE

• Workload/Applications:               Energy Efficiency Performance

click on “Server Power Consumption – Two-Socket AMD Opteron™ HE Processor-Based Servers (Low-Power Processors)”.

5.  AMD Opteron™ processor-based servers provide superior performance when comparing servers using processors priced at $744.

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:          AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                            Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:              Integer Throughput Performance

Click on“SPECint®_rate2006 – Two-Socket Servers ($744 Processors)”

6. Servers using AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors provide superior performance to servers using Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors at a number of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:           AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                             Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:              Compute Intensive Application Performance

click on“HPC Application Performance Summary – Two-Socket Servers”

7. Servers using AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors support significantly more DDR3-1333 DIMMs than servers using Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors. Support for a large number of high speed DDR3-1333 DIMMs can benefit High Performance Computing, Database, and Virtualization applications that require a large amount of memory to operate at high speeds.

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:          AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                           Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:             Performance Summary

click on “Memory Scalability – Two-Socket Servers”.

8. Servers using AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors provide significantly more performance than servers using other AMD Opteron™ processors in the market today.

To view these charts, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:           AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                            Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:              Performance Summary

“Performance Summary – Two-Socket Servers (including AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor)

“Performance Summary – Four-Socket Servers”

“Performance Summary Over Time – Two-Socket Servers (including AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor)”

“Performance Summary Over Time – Four-Socket Servers”

9. As the number of programs running on each server increases, the performance of AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor-based servers scales better than the performance of servers using Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors. More information on this topic is available here.

To view this chart, make the following selections:

• Processors and Platforms:        AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series Processor

• Power Bands:                          Mainstream

• Workload/Applications:            Performance Summary

 “True Core Scalability – Two-Socket Servers”.

This is only a sampling of the information available. There is also data available comparing the feature sets of $744 processors available from AMD and Intel (“Feature Set Comparison – Two-Socket Servers”), information on how effectively performance scales from two-socket servers to four-socket servers (“Performance Scaling – Two-Socket and Four-Socket Servers”), and comparisons of servers using 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz AMD Opteron™ processors.

What else would you like to see? We’d love to hear your input in the comments section.

Andy Parma is a Product Marketing Manager 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. 

 

SPEC, SPECint, and SPECfp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

¹Pricing reflects 1kU tray pricing on www.amd.com and www.intel.com as of March 29, 2010.