AMD's 3rd generation Opteron versus Intel's 45nm Xeon: a closer look
by Johan De Gelas on November 27, 2007 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
3ds Max 9 (32-bit Windows)
We tested with the 32-bit version of 3ds Max version 9, which has improvements that help multi-core systems but which is not as aggressively tuned for SSE as LINPACK and zVisuel. We used the "architecture" scene, which has been a favorite benchmarking scene for years. We performed all tests with 3ds Max's default scanline renderer, we enabled SSE support, and we rendered at HD 720p (1280x720) resolution. We measured the time it takes to render ten frames (frames 20 to 29).
As promised, we profiled our different benchmarks to understand them better. We performed profiling with AMD's CodeAnalyst; VTune profiling will follow later. 3ds Max runs four modules when you render:
- Render
(46% of the time)
- Ray-FX (28%)
- Geometry (15%)
- Core (11%)
To keep things simple, we summarized our findings with a weighted average over all modules.
| 3dsmax Profiling | |
| Profile | Total |
| Average IPC (on AMD 2350) | 1 |
| Instruction mix | |
| Floating Point | 39% |
| SSE | 12% |
| Branches | 13% |
| L1 datacache ratio | 0.56 |
| L1 Instruction ratio | 0.27 |
| Performance indicators on Opteron 2350 | |
| Branch misprediction | 6% |
| L1 datacache miss | 1% |
| L1 Instruction cache miss | 5% |
| L2 cache miss | 0% |
As you can see, 3ds Max is mostly about floating-point performance with a bit of SSE instructions. It runs perfectly in the L1 and L2 cache of our CPUs. To make the graph easier to read we did not report our results in the classic way (rendering time) but expressed them in images rendered per hour (10 images * 3600 seconds divided by render time). Higher is therefore better.
The Xeon 5472 is about 8% faster than its older brother and widens the gap from the AMD Armada. We included quite a few results of older tests. This benchmark focuses on the CPU; chipset and RAM choices don't impact performance much. Interestingly, the Opteron 2350 is about as fast as four 2.4GHz single-core Opterons. Thus, in software with a "small dash" of SSE, the new architecture is about 20% faster. If we extrapolate our AMD quad-core results to 3GHz, the result would be about 59 images per second, which indicates that AMD's newest is about 10% slower than Intel clock for clock. That is no real surprise anymore: FLOPS showed us that the raw x87 FP and SSE power of AMD's latest architecture is slightly lower than the newest Xeon. It also can only overpower the Xeon 53xx if there are enough divisions involved. AMD's Barcelona architecture will only show a real advantage in bandwidth limited FP situations such as SPECfp2006 and many HPC applications.
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tshen83 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Seriously, can you buy the 2360SE? Newegg doesn't even stock the 1.7Ghz 2344HEs.The same situation exist on the Phenom line of CPUs. I don't see the value of reviewing Phenom 9700, 9900s when AMD cannot deliver them. I am trouble locating Phenom 9500s.
alantay - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
The MySQL scalability problem is not so much in MySQL as in the Linux kernel and Glibc used.To have it scale correctly to 8 CPUs you need kernel 2.6.22.x (alternatively you could try with a 2.6.24-RC -should be a bit faster-, but not with 2.6.23.x) and Glibc 2.6 or higher.
A default Ubuntu 7.10 for example should scale well with MySQL (OpenSUSE 10.3 *might* work, but they have backported the 2.6.23 scheduler which has a scalability problem).
Thanks for the article!
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Excellent feedback.It is a bit frustrating that once again you need some ultra new kernel and libraries to get good scalability. THat is unrealistic for people who use SLES and who rely on their support contract to get updates.
MGSsancho - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
how about opensolaris? i dont know how much different it is from solaris 10, but it should be able to scale to dozens of cores nicely. I was about to ask about oracle and DB2 benchmarks but you answered that in your article; expensive, and the oems usually publish that info.anyways awesome article
Roy2001 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I cannot find a SINGLE one, nowhere.drebo - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Newegg has the Phenom 9500 in stock. At least, they did yesterday. I've also got a vendor I use that has them in stock.JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
But Phenom isn't Opteron 23xx. Different socket, different market, and it has L3. (Does Phenom X4 have an L3 cache? Maybe I should go check....)drebo - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Yes, Phenom 9500 has an L3. But if you look at his question (in the subject line), he is asking about barcelona as a whole and phenom specifically. The answer is Yes, they are available.Slaimus - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
They may be gobbled by up Cray for that Budapest supercomputer.Regs - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I would not expect any from vendors and wholesalers until early next year.Matter of fact I wouldn't want one until then anyhow. I would at least wait until B3 stepping.