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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
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.
TA152H - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Johan,From my understanding, x87 is now obsolete and not even supported in x86-64. Can you verify this? I know I had read it, from your article you state that Intel improved it, so I'm not as sure. I had assumed one of AMD's handicaps was the disproportionate, and nearly useless, x87 processing power their processors carried, but now I am not as sure. Is x87 supported in x86-64, and if not, why would Intel increase their x87 capabilities when it's clearly a deprecated technology?
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
The x87 instructions can be used in legacy mode and long mode. But it is true that Scalar SSE instructions are preferred by AMD and Intel.x87 performance as many 32 bit programs are still important (look at 3DSMAx 32 bit).
If Intel's newest Core architecture would not have improved the x87 FP it would probably have looked silly as so many 32 bit programs still use it intensively. Secondly, as you can see, things like the Radix-16 circuitry are used by both the SIMD as the x87 units.
Gholam - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Do you have any plans to benchmark Opteron vs Xeon in an ESX Server environment?DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
This is exactly what I was thinking of too. I want to change my mode of working to run several separate VM's, one for programming, one for Office etc and really want to know how Phenom compares to Q6600 for those uses. Well, this article looks at the server versions of those chips but for VMware the performance might be more comparable than, say, SuperPi 1M benchmarks!DeepThought86 - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I forgot to add, since Phenom would presumably also have the nested table support as Barcelona, how much performance improvement would this yield? I'd love to knowsht - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
I was about to ask the same question after reading the concludingYou may feel for example that using four instances in our SPECjbb test favors AMD too much, but there is no denying that using more virtual machines on fewer physical servers is what is happening in the real world.
Since the CPUs have features that should accelerate virtualization, it would really be interesting to see how they compete there. My only addition to your request would be to add KVM as host as well (and XEN and what not as well if you care, though I really think only KVM is of interest).
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Indeed, we are working on that. The software that we described here (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2997&am... is being adapted to testing virtualized applications. We are also looking into the parameters that can really influence the results of a benchmark on a virtualized server.AssBall - Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - link
Thanks, Johan.This has been one of the clearer and better proofread articles I have read here lately. It was interesting, unbiased, and insightful. I am excited to see what you get into for your next project.