13 August, 2004 by Simone Gallizia.

Categoria: Linux 64-Bit

Opteron, come previsto, stupisce ancora

Anandtech a questo indirizzo ha pubblicato una comparativa tra Opteron 150 (2.4GHz) e Nocona 3.6GHz, il nuovo processore Xeon a 64-bit. I test, che vanno dall'ambito server a quello workstation, sono stati condotti su SuSE 9.1 Professional a 64 bit e mostrano una supremazia quasi imbarazzante da parte di Opteron. Il processore AMD costa meno di $500, mentre Xeon Nocona 3.6GHz sopra gli $800. Tra l'altro Nocona, nonostante sia stato ufficialmente lanciato da Intel, non ha ancora raggiunto il mercato.

Insomma, le voci che davano come scadente l'implementazione da parte di Intel dei 64-bit erano fondate.

Riporto le conclusioni di Anandtech:
First of all, AMD's Opteron 150 is the highest performing AMD workstation CPU money can buy. Thus, it is priced around $600 at time of publication. (The nearly identical FX-53 is priced slightly higher). Intel's Xeon 3.6GHz / Pentium 4 3.6F processor is the highest performing Intel workstation CPU money can't buy; although it has shown up in various OEM channels, it really has not hit the market in full force yet. When it does, we are expected to see it retail for $850. This automatically raises the question as to whether or not these two are directly competing processors. Since prices in the market fluctuate daily depending on vendor stock with such high end CPUs, we leave that decision up to the reader.

Secondly, GCC 3.3.3 optimizations became a larger than expected variable in these tests. As shown in the TSCP benchmark, changing the optimization flags wildly changed performance of the Opteron CPU, while the Nocona only received mild benefits. We also hear that GCC 3.4 tends to increase performance on the Opteron CPUs even further, although we ran out of time to complete that test.