Test notes
You'll want to watch several key matchups in the results, including:
- Opteron 2350 vs. Xeon E5345 — This is the matchup AMD has identified as the most direct comparison on a price and performance basis. Looks to me like E5345s still cost more than the Opteron 2350's list price, but this 2.33GHz Xeon will be a good foil for the 2GHz Barcelona.
- Opteron 2350 vs. Xeon L5335 — Here's your clock-for-clock comparison between Intel's quad-core Xeons and AMD's quad-core Opterons. The L5335 is a brand-new, low-power version of the Xeon whose most direct competitor might be the Opteron 2347 HE, but CPU microarchitecture geeks will appreciate comparing performance per clock between these two.
- Opteron 2360 SE vs. Opteron 2218 HE — Watch this one in single-threaded (and up to four-threaded) tests to get a rough sense of Barcelona's per-clock performance versus older Opterons. The 2218 HE runs at 2.6GHz and the 2360 SE runs at 2.5GHz, so it's not an exact match, but it's close.
- Opteron 2360 SE vs. Xeon X5365 — The best of breed from AMD and Intel face off.
You can see our system configs and test applications below. We've tried to produce as direct a comparison as possible. We even tested the Xeons and Opterons 2300s in the same sort of chassis with the same cooling solution. The Opteron 2200s were in a slightly different enclosure, but I did some testing and believe the power consumption from its cooling fans is similar. All of the systems used the same model of power suppy unit.
I think we have a good mix of tests, but they're more heavily geared toward HPC and digital content creation than traditional server workloads. We have added SPECjbb2005 this time out, and we continue working on developing some other server-oriented tests to add to our suite. Unfortunately, our preparation time for this review was limited.
Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and the results were averaged.
Our test systems were configured like so:
| Processors | Dual
Xeon L5335 2.0GHz Dual Xeon E5345 2.33GHz Dual Xeon X5365 3.0GHz |
Dual
Opteron
2218 HE 2.6GHz Dual Opteron 2220 2.8GHz |
Dual
Opteron 2350 2.0GHz Dual Opteron 2360 SE 2.5GHz |
| System bus | 1333MHz (333MHz quad-pumped) | 1GHz HyperTransport | 1GHz HyperTransport |
| Motherboard | SuperMicro X7DB8+ | Tyan Tiger K8SSA (S3992) | SuperMicro H8DMU+ |
| BIOS revision | 8/13/2007 | 5/29/2007 | 8/15/2007 |
| North bridge | Intel 5000P MCH | ServerWorks BCM 5780 | Nvidia nForce Pro 3600 |
| South bridge | Intel 6321 ESB ICH | ServerWorks BCM 5785 | Nvidia nForce Pro 3600 |
| Chipset drivers | INF Update 8.3.0.1013 | - | SMBus driver 4.57 |
| Memory size | 8GB (8 DIMMs) | 8GB (8 DIMMs) | 8GB (8 DIMMs) |
| Memory type | 1024MB DDR2-667 FB-DIMMs at 667MHz | 1024MB ECC reg. DDR2-667 DIMMs at 667MHz | 1024MB ECC reg. DDR2-667 DIMMs at 667MHz |
| CAS latency (CL) | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| RAS precharge (tRP) | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Cycle time (tRAS) | 15 | 13 | 15 |
| Storage controller |
Intel
6321 ESB ICH with Intel Matrix Storage Manager 7.6 |
Broadcom
RAIDCore with 1.1.7057.1 drivers |
Nvidia
nForce Pro 3600 with 6.87 drivers |
| Hard drive | WD Caviar WD1600YD 160GB | ||
| Graphics | Integrated ATI ES1000 with 6.14.10.6553 drivers | ||
| OS | Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition with Service Pack 2 | ||
| Power supply | Ablecom PWS-702A-1R 700W | ||
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- SiSoft Sandra XI.SP4a 64-bit
- CPU-Z 1.40
- SPECjbb2005 with Sun Java 6 Update 2 Windows x64 edition
- Valve VRAD map build benchmark
- Cinebench R10 64-bit Edition
- POV-Ray for Windows 3.7 beta 22 64-bit
- CASE Lab Euler3d CFD benchmark multithreaded edition
- MyriMatch proteomics benchmark
- notfred's Folding benchmark CD 8/8/07 revision
- picCOLOR 4.0 build 598 64-bit
- The Panorama Factory 4.5 x64 Edition
- Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Edition
The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
