ANANDTECH: a decent Opteron Review

I found Tomshardware review of the Opteron absolutely appalling !! I admit I myself dont know that much about benchmarking but jesus christ his setup and tests were totally messed up. Even the benchmarks he used dont have any significance to 'real world' performance. The benchmarks he used were purely scienfitic and do not translate into anything. They are just a bunch of figures with no real meaning.

For a proper review I suggest you visit <A HREF="http://www.aceshardware.com" target="_new">Aces Hardware</A> or even better <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com" target="_new">Anandtech</A>.

(Anandtech uses real world examples of just what Opteron is capable of with benchmarks that actually mean something)

<font color=purple>Ladies and Gentlemen, its...Hammer Time !</font color=purple>

Why should Anand's review be more reliable then THG's? Ok, the benchmarks themselves are indeed real-world examples, but ...
1) They don't tell us what hardware they use.
2) They use only one type of webserver and DB-server, which might favour one of the two architectures. I really don't know much about it, but it look to me like testing a game-macine by using only for example Return to Castle Wolfenstein. But you'll also have to test other games in order to get a complete overview.

So far my comments, because for the rest, Anad's review is quite open, I think.

Greetz,
Bikeman

<i>Then again, that's just my opinion</i>

They specifically mentioned that "all hardware used were the same when possible". And as for the review. They used 3 different DB servers. If you look at tomshardware's review, it was two SQL servers with different commands (commands which are rarely used may I add).

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

So far, by Anandtech's results, I am more impressed somehow. We see only 32-bit performance here as well.
Yes there is also the lack of Xeon MP 1MB 3.06GHZ, which does impair things.
However in the total pages processed test, it is simply nothing short of amazing. A true web server.

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Also, check out aceshardware... they have also done a very thourough and detailed opteron review.

<b>Now can someone explain how we ever got the idea that baby bunnies lay multicolored eggs made of chocolate in our living rooms?" </b>
<A HREF="http://members.iinet.net.au/~lhgpoobaa/images" target="_new">http://members.iinet.net.au/~lhgpoobaa/images</A>

It could be, but again it all depends on HT scaling.

Which brings me to another interesting finding.
Logically, since HT allows excellent scalability and flexibility of added CPUs, that means that once you continue adding CPUs, the lead the Opteron will have will be even more significant. So 2-way only shows a fraction of what Opteron's damage can be.

I am honestly surprised overall at Opteron. This is the only product this year so far that has not disappointed me, out of all the products and technologies out from any hardware company. Well, yeah it disappointed me in Workstation, especially but ESPECIALLY SSE2, when you remember that Opteron's bandwidth is aplenty, at 5.4GB/sec, which makes you just wonder how the heck does the P4 win more with SSE2, not to mention Opteron DOUBLING SSE2 register amount! Sometimes it also felt like the Barton 2500+ was easily playing against the Opteron, when the latter has a damn powerful memory controller. But, I think you're right Juin, lack of driver and compiler optimization easily hurts such a new chip.

But again, for a new core, it most definitely does not do badly. Imagine an Opteron against a similar clocked Pentium 4, such as a 1.8GHZ 533MHZ Xeon underclocked. OUCH!

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adding CPU increase lantency on opteron not on Xeon but bandwith dont scale you just need a Quad channel DDR with point to point link like Redwood from rambus can be use having much less lantency that intergrade controleur from AMD and fixe lantency

[-peep-] french