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
Floating-point Analyses (Linux 64-bit)
AMD's newest quad-core behaves pretty weird when it comes to floating-point applications. In some FP intensive applications (CINEBENCH and LINPACK for example) a 2GHz quad-core cannot even keep up with Intel's older 2GHz 65nm quad-core CPUs; in other applications it is a close match (3ds Max, POV-Ray); finally, in applications like zVisuel's 3D Engine and SPECfp, Barcelona is clearly faster clock-for-clock than the older generation. Our aim is to understand this situation a little better and to see what the 45nm Xeon 54xx can achieve.
To understand this we first tested with two synthetic, but completely opposite FP benchmarks:
- LINPACK,
which calculates on massive matrices
- FLOPS, which fits in an 8 KB L1 cache
Let us start with LINPACK. LINPACK, a benchmark application based on the LINPACK TPP code, has become the industry standard benchmark for HPC. It solves large systems of linear equations by using a high performance matrix kernel.
We used a workload of square matrices of sizes 5000 to 30000 by steps of 5000, and we ran four (dual dual-core) or eight (dual quad-core) threads. As the system was equipped with 8GB of RAM, the large matrixes all ran in memory. LINPACK is expressed in GFLOPS (Giga/Billions of Floating Operations Per Second).
We used two versions of LINPACK:
- Intel's
version of LINPACK compiled with the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL)
- A fully optimized "K10-only" version for AMD's quad-core
The "K10-only" version uses the ACML version 4.0.0, compiled using the PGI 7.0.7. We used the following flags:
pgcc -O3 -fast -tp=barcelona-64
The graph above may come as a surprise to a quite few people. At the lower matrix sizes, AMD's quad-core is even a bit faster with the "Intel version" than with the specially optimized version. Only while calculating with the larger matrices does the heavily tuned version pull ahead. The K10-only version of LINPACK is about 6% faster, and the most important reason for that improvement is the ACML library of AMD. However, it is clear that the Intel MKL and compiler are not slowing the AMD core down when it is running LINPACK.
There is more. At first sight, the AMD 2360SE scores seem rather poor: just a tiny bit faster than the 2.33GHz quad-core of Intel. However, the Intel CPU scales rather poorly with clock speed: a 3GHz Clovertown is only 6% faster than a 2.33GHz one while the clock speed advantage is 28%. The Barcelona core however scales 19% from a 20% clock speed boost. The new Seaburg platform cannot help here: a 3GHz Xeon E5365 was capable of 57.1 GFLOPS, while it got 57 GFLOPS with the older chipset.
Intel's clever compiler engineers have already found a way around this, as the newest release of their LINPACK version is quite a bit faster on both Clovertown and Harpertown. The LINPACK score increases to 70 GLOPs for the Xeon 5472 3GHz (60.5 in our test) and 63 for the Xeon E5365 3GHz (57 in our test). Unfortunately, we don't have any data on what has changed, so we decided to freeze our benchmark code for now.
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befair - Friday, November 28, 2008 - link
ok .. getting tired of this! Intel loving Anandtech employs very unfair & unreasonable tactics to show AMD processors in bad light every single time. And most readers have no clue about the jargon Anandtech uses every time.1 - HPL needs to be compiled with appropriate flags to optimize code for the processor. Anandtech always uses the code that is optimized for Intel processors to measure performance on AMD processors. As much as AMD and Intel are binary compatible, when measuring performance even a college grad who studies HPC knows the code has to be recompiled with the appropriate flags
2 - Clever words: sometimes even 4 GFLOPS is described as significant performance difference
3- "The Math Kernel Libraries are so well optimized that the effect of memory speed is minimized." - So ... MKL use is justified because Intel processors need optimized libraries for good performance. However, they dont want to use ACML for AMD processors. Instead they want to use MKL optimized for Intel on AMD processors. Whats more ... Intel codes optimize only for Intel processors and disable everything for every other processors. They have corrected it now but who knows!! read here http://techreport.com/discussions.x/8547">http://techreport.com/discussions.x/8547
I am not saying anything bad about either processor but an independent site that claims to be fair and objective in bringing facts to the readers is anything but fair and just!!! what a load!
DonPMitchell - Friday, December 7, 2007 - link
I think a lot of us are intrigued by AMD's memory architecture, its ability to support NUMA, etc. A lot of benchmarch test how fast a small application runs with a high cash-hit rate, and that's not necessarily interesting to everyone.The MySQL test is the right direction, but I'd rather see numbers for a more sophisticated application that utilizes multiple cores -- Oracle or MS SQL Server, for example. These are products designed to run on big iron like Unisys multi-proc servers, so what happens when they are running on these more economical Harpertown or Barcelona.
kalyanakrishna - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
http://scalability.org/?p=453">http://scalability.org/?p=453kalyanakrishna - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
a much better review than the original one. But I still see some cleverly put sentences, wish it were otherwise.Viditor - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Nice review Johan!On the steppimgs note you made, it's not the B2 stepping that is supposed to perform better, it's the BA stepping...
The BA stepping was the improved form for B1s, and the B3 stepping is the improved form of the B2. BA and B2 came out at the same time in Sept (though BA was the one launched, B1 was what was reviewed), B2 for Phenom and performance clockspeeds, BA for standard and low power chips.
Do you happen to have a BA chip to test (those are the production chips)?
BitByBit - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Despite K10's rather extensive architectural improvements, it looks likes its core performance isn't too different to K8. In fact, the gains we've seen so far could easily be attributable to the improved memory controller and increased cache bandwidth. It seems that introducing load reordering, a dedicated stack, improved branch prediction, 32B instruction fetch, and improved prefetching has had little impact, certainly far less than expected. The question is, why?JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Well, we are still seeing 5-10% better integer performance on applications that are runing in the L2, so it is more than just a K8 with a better IMC. But you are right, I expected more too.However, the MySQL benchmark deserves more attention. In this case the Barcelona core is considerably faster than the previous generation (+ 25%). This might be a case where 32 bit fetch and load reordering are helping big time. But unfortunately our Codeanalyst failed to give all the numbers we needed
BaronMatrix - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
At any rate, it was the most in-depth review I've seen, especially with the code analysis. I too, thought it would be higher, but remember that Barcelona is NOT HT3 and doesn't have the advantage of "gangning\unganging." There was an interesting article recently that showed perf CAN be improved by unganging (maybe it was ganging, can't find it) the HT3 links.I really hate that OEMs decided to stand up to the big, bad AMD and DEMAND that Barcelona NOT have HT3 with ALL OF ITS BENEFITS.
I mean people complain that Barcelona uses more power, but HT3 would cut that somewhat. At least in idle mode, and even in cases where IMC is used more than the CPU or vice versa.
I also may as well use this to CONDEMN all of these "analysts" who insist on crapping on the underdog that keeps prices reasonable and technology advancing.
INSERT SEVERAL EXPLETIVES. REPEATEDLY. FOR A FEW DAYS. A WEEK. FOR A YEAR.
INSERT MORE EXPLETIVES.
donaldrumsfeld - Wednesday, November 28, 2007 - link
Conjecture regarding why AMD went quad core on the same die... and this has nothing to do with performance. I think one place where Intel is way ahead of AMD is package technology. Remember they were doing a type of Multichip module with the P6. Having 2 dice instead of a single die allows them to have an overall lower defect rate, higher yield, and higher GHz. This is vs. AMD's lower GHz but (it was hoped) greater data efficiency using an L3 die and lower latency of on-die communications amongst cores vs. Intel's solution of die to die communication.Can anyone confirm/deny this?
thanks
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 have trouble locating Phenom 9500s.