AMD's 12-core "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6174 vs. Intel's 6-core Xeon
by Johan De Gelas on March 29, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Final Words
The beancounters will probably point out that AMD’s strategy of bolting two CPU dies at 346 mm² together is quite costly. But this is the server CPU market, margins are quite a bit higher. Let AMD worry about the issue of margins. If AMD is willing to sell us - IT professionals - two CPUs for the price of one, we will not complain. It means that the fierce competitive market is favoring the customer. The bottom line is: is this twelve-core Opteron a good deal? For users waiting to use it in a workstation we have our doubts. You’ll benefit from the extra cores when rendering complex scenes, but in all other scenarios (quick simple rendering, modeling) the higher clocked and higher IPC Xeon X5600 series is simply the better choice.
Applications based on transactional databases (OLTP and ERP) are also better off with new Xeon. The SAP and our own Oracle Calling Circle benchmark all point in the same direction. Intel has a tangible performance advantage in both benchmarks.
Data mining applications clearly benefit from having “real” instead of “logical” cores. For datamining, we believe the 12-core Opteron is the clear winner. It offers 20% better performance at 20% lower prices, a good deal if you ask us. Intel’s relatively high prices for its six-core are challenged. The increased competition turns this into a buyers market again.
And then there is the most important segment: the virtualization market. We estimate that the new Opteron 6174 is about 20% slower than the Xeon 5670 in virtualized servers with very high VM counts. The difference is a lot smaller in the opposite scenario: a virtualized server with a few very heavy VMs. Here the choice is less clear. At this point, we believe both server CPUs consume about the same power, so that does not help either to make up our minds. It will depend on how the OEMs price their servers. The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs. You can go for 96 GB of memory with affordable 4 GB DIMMs, while the Intel server is limited to 72 GB there. That is a small bonus for the AMD server.
The HPC market seems to favor AMD once again. AMD holds only a small performance advantage, and this market is very cost sensitive. The lower price will probably convince the HPC people to go for the AMD based servers.
All in all, this is good news for the IT professional that is a hardware enthusiast. Profiling your application and matching it to the right server CPU pays off and that is exactly what set us apart from the average IT professional.
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564265425722557 - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
1. Why is the TDP of the 65W ACP Magny Cours the question mark? And are you sure the TDP of the 80W ACP ones 115W?2. The Intel systems have only 24GB ram against the 32GB ram on the 2S magny cours. That's why the 100GB database test favors the Magny cours by a large margin.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
AMD told us the TDP values of the Magny-Cours at 80 and 105W ACP. The TDP values of the Lower power versions were not disclosed yet.And as we disclosed on the benchmark config page, none of the benches uses more than 20 GB. The vAPus mark I uses about 19 GB. The SQL Server uses much less. While the SQL server test has to scan through the complete index, it does access the complete 100 GB data. There absolutely no advantage for the Opterons there. We checked.
The fact that we spec the servers like that is a direct consequence of their memory channels (3 and 4). There is not much we can do about that.
Penti - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
How about about 4P performance? It's cheap now and it's AMD whole selling point. I guess you can get a 4P 48-core 128GB system for not that much. How would that compare to a say 2P Nehalem 12-core 92GB? Wouldn't they cost about the same? Will it still be competitive against 8-core 2P Nehalem-EX? And how about the 4P (like 6-core versions) Nehalem-EX? How about the 8-core versions of 6100 series Opterons?elnexus - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
In answer to cost:Compare our 2P Xeon 5600-series Workstation :http://elnexus.com/products.aspx?line_id=15514
with our 4P Opteron 6100-series Workstation: http://elnexus.com/products.aspx?line_id=15635
(I hope this isn't condemned as advertising, since it is an attempt to answer a question about price vs performance.)
Note how low priced the 6128 chip is (the default chip included in the base price).
AMD, I think are running away from Intel if you factor in the price...
Penti - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Thanks, I don't condemn it as advertising as this is a new platform so it's interesting and hard to get prices for complete systems yet. Basically 4P 8-core 6100-series opterons with 128GB DDR3 ECC REG cost as much as 2P six-core Xeon (Westmere EP) with 96GB DDR3 ECC REG. Mainly because you can use cheaper 4GB sticks and still get 128GB. And partly because there's no longer any markup for above >2P parts. I guess it accounts for something. Yeah, 6128 chip virtually don't cost nothing for being 4P compatible. Guess it helps AMD for a lot of workload scenarios. And since you can get 4P in 1U it's really nothing that speaks against it. Will be interesting to see what the Nehalem-EX can do though.TitanusComp - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
You can really get a good idea by comparing this two products:48 Cores:
http://www.titanuscomputers.com/A400-AMD-Workstati...
24 Cores (Quad SLi Capable)
http://www.titanuscomputers.com/X450-Intel-High-Pe...
Now, things to consider, do you need CPU or GPU power?
duploxxx - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
To make the whole benchmark complete I think you should ask some AMD Opteron 6136 from AMD to get a full review.duploxxx - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
and add the 56xx 4core counterpart off courseJohanAnandtech - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
We are working on it. Expect an update with new SKUs this month. I would say next week, but I would like to take some time to do some in depth analysis.Hacp - Monday, March 29, 2010 - link
Anand,I want to ask why are you biased against AMD? You should base your tests based on price. AMD is selling their 12 core for the price of an Intel 6 core. Compare apples to apples! Do a 12 core vs 6 core comparison and see who wins. Otherwise, you are doing a disservice.