Has anyone seen any 2345 Istanbul cpus in the wild at this point?

Your power measurements on the X5550 server appears to be 100 watts too high.

The Istanbul power measurements look like all other AMD Opteron servers measured on the official SPEC.org database. However, your measurement on the X5550 at 350+ watts is ~100 watts higher than every other server running the X5570 CPU on the official SPEC.org database. Clearly the AMD Istanbul system seems to be running an optimum low power configuration but the Intel Nehalem system is running far from what anyone would consider optimum in terms of energy efficiency.

You can see for yourself here and see a significant power discrepancy on the Intel server but not the AMD server
http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2009q2/power_ssj2008-2... X5570
http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2009q2/power_ssj2008-2... X5570
http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2009q1/power_ssj2008-2... 2384
http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/results/res2009q2/power_ssj2008-2... 2377HE

Now I’m not suggesting foul play here, but this particular discrepancy especially in the context of your report’s claim that it will put AMD’s ACP power claims to test is very problematic. It invalidates the results that Istanbul servers are nearly as energy efficient when they’re actually significantly less efficient.

Now I looked into your methodology and I may have found the culprit. The X5550 system is running an unusually powerful graphics chipset for a server with the Nvidia GeForce 8400 on a SuperMicro X8DA3. I have never seen anyone using a server board with a gaming graphics card before, and none of the other systems you tested used such an unusual graphics system. That particular motherboard might also have an inefficient VRM or something else. I’d be curious where you got this motherboard for you to get a power measurement result that is 100 watts higher than everyone else.

Now I’m sorry if I sound critical of your work because I respect your work overall. But I think you need to look into this discrepancy and come up with an explanation.

Do this on desktop Phenom III hehe then we will buy it

Hey uh, has AMD made any mention perchance of making a home desktop variant of this?

Hmmmm, Istanbul is interesting. I am afraid that upcoming Westmere-based Xeons (also sextal-core) are going to take the lead by a good margin.

Its about time that an AMD CPU got top scores on Sandra Mandelbrot. More cores finally did the trick? Or was it something more subtle?

100th post FTW!

Aaaaa...guys. In the x264 benchmark...you seem to speculate about x264's second encoding pass being more multi-threaded than the first...I wouldn't know...but did you specifically instructed x264 to run in multithreaded mode? Like "x264 -o benchmark.264 --threads 6 input.yuv 1280x720"? This'll start x264 with 6 separate encoding threads in parallel.

So for the Xeons this would be --threads 8 (4 x 2 Hyper Threading ones), for the Istanbul --threads 6 and so on....

I didn't see any server workload tests, like sql, etc.

Whilst drop-in upgrades makes the new Opteron a no-brainer for that particular market segment, the carrot for new sales is the exact same argument.

"Why buy a marginally faster Xeon server when AMD has a history of allowing longer platform life and lower overall TCO?"

Sure, you're making an assumption that AMD will continue to support socket F, but then historic data would suggest that they will, and in a worst case scenario, the new Opterons aren't inferior enough to make you second-guess your decision.

I know this is an Opty review, but I noticed on page 7 this weird occilation in the Xeon *55** procs, at idle. What's up with that?

edit: Ah, Damage/George might have IDed where the flux comes from - the 8400 GS might be doing some funny things with the idle power on those two systems.

Great article, as always.

An engineer friend of mine went on a rant once about tri-core, sextal-core, etc. processors (basically any processor that doesn't have a number of cores that is a multiple of two). He said something about losing overhead (or registers?) by having three, six, etc. cores. Does anyone here care to elaborate on this in more detail? I can't seem to find any info on it anywhere.

Unfortunately, every time I see the word "Istanbul", the song "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" starts playing in my head.

:-(

ha as i thought. nothing much changed in the synthetic tests as istanbul has the same frequency of NB and HT which is why they show similar results. only in multi threaded apps they show their performance. and i dont think the competition is fair b/w the intels and amds processors. Firstly intel has triple channel DDR3 memory running at 1333mhz where as AMD has dual channel DDR2 memory running at 800mhz. the difference in the clocks is way too much to compare. Intel has 8 virtual cores and AMD has 6 physical cores. I dont know which is a good idea in this case. And hey AMD has a low L3 cache speed so it isnt suprising to see Intel is leading in all synthetic benchmarks. AMD should probably increase their clock speeds and L3 cache speeds to get near the Intel processors. they are pretty close in real world performance so these two factors might help.

While it's great that AMD does some catching up here, the fact that Nehalem does what it does with not even two thirds of Istanbuls die size really does make me *gulp*

AMD can come out with a 6-core AM3 desktop chip, clock it at 3.2 core, 2.2 NB, 2.4 HT Link, and sell it for a pretty good amount with these results. Istanbul isn't bad at all over standard 4-core systems.

They have to get this out for desktop use ASAP.

It's been a while since I saw AMD finish something *early*, nice surprise.

But can it run Crysis?

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night

Came here to say that. Now I'll read the article.

I demand this article be re-written with more anti-Indilinx/OCZ SSD bashing.

You know uh, it's hard for me to make my own interpretations of server-class benchmarks, so I'm afraid I only read the first and last pages... and meanwhile wait for the Podcast topic.

The review doesn't mention the fact that the quad core Xeons do with 4 cores what the Opterons barely manage to do with 6.

Magny-Cours, for instance, will be fully connected on a per chip basis, not just per socket, in a 2P system. The routing on a 4P system becomes very daunting, very quickly, but the bottom line is that it's fully connected per socket, not per die, with no more than two hops required in any scenario. Goddard said it was "a science experiment" getting that 4P routing topology done.

Heh, I bet. What is that, a Hyper-Duodecahedron?

How is this benchmark relevant for a server CPU? We already knew that Istanbul has the same core architecture as Shanghai and the same amount of cache so really no surprises here. These benchmarks only showed us that multi-threaded tests scale well on Istanbul. What did you expect? Some magic-infused new ALU and some SMT baked into the cores that makes Istanbul core perform Nehalem like?
Your tests should have been on 2P or 4P servers and with actual SERVER benchmarks (including virtualization). I don't blame you for not having a 4P server but please try and not run Folding@Home on a server CPU.
What's to notice here is the power consumption of Istanbul which is quite impressive (less than X5550 and equal to Shanghai @ 2.9).
I'm quite sure that 2.8 Ghz or even 2.9Ghz Istanbuls are on their way so AMD is not so dead as you all think (at least not this year).
Also...the graphs are a bit misleading. At first i thought you're testing a single processor.
PS: Anandtech has a nice review too.

Yes, that is exactly why it is a good meme (it's a stupid and pointless question) :P

edit: bleh meant to reply to 6

Well as a Socket F server upgrade, you can't beat Istanbul. Good power consumption as well - 6 cores in 75W with good performance! The power consumption benchmarks were very good. I think we can say that AMD's 45nm process is pretty decent. In addition I think Istanbul is good enough for a company that is AMD based to continue using AMD processors and keep a stable platform, even for new server purchases.

Of course AMD needs to get their next platform out, and enable DDR3 for Istanbul. Also if they had a way to overclock cores when others were idle (for low-threaded apps) then they would have improved results as well.

Of course Istanbul will benefit a lot in the 4P and 8P markets because of the HT Assist, which doesn't help on the 2P reviews that I have seen. With no 4P Nehalem CPU out yet, and when it does come out a full platform validation requirement for businesses, this is where AMD can regain a lot of ground and stand proud.

It was also a shame to not see any virtualisation benchmarks, but Anandtech mostly did a good job here.

Well, this is a tasty article with which to start the week.

At least AMD can catch a breather...but the new xeons and nehalem EX are going to crush them, if they don't do some serious magic...