AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon: Database Performance Shootout

Final Words

The 533MHz FSB 2MB L3 Prestonia based Xeon manages to help Intel tremendously in keeping competitive with the Opteron. In fact, under heavy enough workloads there is virtually no performance difference between a 3.2GHz Xeon and a 2.2GHz Opteron (x48). It isn't until you move to 4-way configurations that AMD's platform architecture begins to flex its muscle. That being said, Intel has done an incredible job of keeping up performance wise in 2-way configurations; we have a much better showing here than we did in the web server test.

Interestingly enough, while the new Gallatin Xeon MPs have a massive 4MB L3 cache, most of that cache will end up being used to keep traffic off of the bandwidth starved 400MHz FSB. The performance gap between the Opteron 848 and the Xeon MP is amplified significantly once you move to a 4-way setup; the Xeon's shared bus just can't cut it anymore, not at 400MHz. AMD's point-to-point Hyper Transport implementation helps extend their performance advantage significantly. An 8-way Opteron vs. Xeon comparison would not be pretty.

In a matter of months, Intel will begin transitioning their Xeon line to 90nm cores - more specifically Nocona (the replacement for the current Prestonia Xeon). The 90nm Xeons will be Prescott derived, which means they get all of the bittersweet changes that went into Prescott. At the same time, this next generation of Xeon processors will enable Intel's 64-bit IA-32e instruction set (read: x86-64). From a performance perspective we would expect the 90nm cores to perform noticeably worse than the current Xeons on a clock for clock basis, but it seems that Intel is avoiding an embarrassing launch by releasing the first Nocona based Xeons at 3.6GHz. With Nocona, Intel will also introduce the 800MHz FSB to the Xeon family - definitely a much needed step in the right direction. For 4-way servers, Intel will have to wait a bit longer; it won't be until the first quarter of 2005 before 64-bit extensions make their way into the Xeon MP processors using the 90nm Potomac core.

The comparison we've made here is a very important one; it identifies Intel's strengths and their weaknesses with Xeon, and it crowns Opteron a clear multiprocessor winner. An area that we didn't touch on is cost, which is where AMD truly shines. The Opteron 848 processors we tested are around 1/2 the price of Intel's 2MB L3 Xeon MPs and we have not seen retail data on how expensive the 4MB parts will be.

In a 4-way configuration AMD's Opteron cannot be beat, and thus it is our choice for the basis for our new Forums database server. We'll be documenting that upgrade in a separate article so stay tuned.