Intel Clovertown: Quad Core for the Masses
by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on March 30, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Clovertown/Woodcrest System
The Clovertown system was supplied by Intel, a standard white box Starlake based platform. We outfitted the system with 8x2GB FB-DIMM 667MHz modules from Micron (MT18HTF25672FDY-667). A single SATA drive was used for the OS, and the system was powered by the OEM supply it came with. We would have liked to use the same power supply for both systems; however, the Clovertown board requires a special 4-pin cable that the Enermax supply doesn't have. Note also that we were not able to get samples of the fastest currently shipping Clovertown processors, and as such the Intel quad core configuration is not the best performing Intel CPU available. (2.66 and now 3.00 GHz versions are available.)
Quad Socket Opteron System
Our contacts over at Tyan provided us with their Thunder n4250QE, which can support up to eight sockets with the M4985 add on module. We outfitted the Thunder with 16x1GB Kingston KVR667D2D8P5/1G 667MHz DDR2 modules. A single SATA drive was used for the OS, and we powered the board with an Enermax Galaxy 1000W.
RAID Storage for both systems
LSI Logic 8480E MegaRaid Controller
Promise VTRAK J300s SAS Chassis
12 x 146GB Fujitsu 15,000 RPM SAS Drives configured in RAID 0
Operating System/Software
Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1 x64
SQL 2005 Enterprise x64 SP1
Benchmark Software
Quest Benchmark Factory v5.0 Build 296
Test Clients
Client 1
Dual Opteron 2220 using a Tyan S3992 motherboard with 8GB of memory
Client 2
Dual Woodcrest 3.0GHz using a Tyan S2696 motherboard with 8GB of memory
Client 3
Dual Clovertown 1.86 using a SuperMicro X7DBE+ motherboard with 2GB of memory
Thanks
We'd like to thank Claudia Martinez over at Kingston, Kelly Sasson over at Micron, Randy Saucedo over at Quest Software, and a big thanks to Frank Chang and our friends over at Tyan for supplying the motherboard for the quad socket Opteron and for helping us out with an additional test client motherboard.
The Clovertown system was supplied by Intel, a standard white box Starlake based platform. We outfitted the system with 8x2GB FB-DIMM 667MHz modules from Micron (MT18HTF25672FDY-667). A single SATA drive was used for the OS, and the system was powered by the OEM supply it came with. We would have liked to use the same power supply for both systems; however, the Clovertown board requires a special 4-pin cable that the Enermax supply doesn't have. Note also that we were not able to get samples of the fastest currently shipping Clovertown processors, and as such the Intel quad core configuration is not the best performing Intel CPU available. (2.66 and now 3.00 GHz versions are available.)
Quad Socket Opteron System
Our contacts over at Tyan provided us with their Thunder n4250QE, which can support up to eight sockets with the M4985 add on module. We outfitted the Thunder with 16x1GB Kingston KVR667D2D8P5/1G 667MHz DDR2 modules. A single SATA drive was used for the OS, and we powered the board with an Enermax Galaxy 1000W.
RAID Storage for both systems
LSI Logic 8480E MegaRaid Controller
Promise VTRAK J300s SAS Chassis
12 x 146GB Fujitsu 15,000 RPM SAS Drives configured in RAID 0
Operating System/Software
Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1 x64
SQL 2005 Enterprise x64 SP1
Benchmark Software
Quest Benchmark Factory v5.0 Build 296
Test Clients
Client 1
Dual Opteron 2220 using a Tyan S3992 motherboard with 8GB of memory
Client 2
Dual Woodcrest 3.0GHz using a Tyan S2696 motherboard with 8GB of memory
Client 3
Dual Clovertown 1.86 using a SuperMicro X7DBE+ motherboard with 2GB of memory
Thanks
We'd like to thank Claudia Martinez over at Kingston, Kelly Sasson over at Micron, Randy Saucedo over at Quest Software, and a big thanks to Frank Chang and our friends over at Tyan for supplying the motherboard for the quad socket Opteron and for helping us out with an additional test client motherboard.
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Visual - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
the two xeon sockets share a common fsb to memory and io bus, right?perhaps you should have included a 1-socket xeon vs 2-socket opteron, just to see how they compare when the xeons aren't as starved for bandwidth... not necessarily a 775 xeon and mobo, i imagine the 771 systems you used now would run just fine with just one of the cpu-s.
sure, that would turn into a core 2 extreme quadcore vs amd 4x4, or their server equivalents running server benchmarks instead of games but i'm still curious about it :p
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I believe (could be wrong - it might be a future chipset; can't say I'm up-to-date on the server chipsets these days) that the Xeons have a Dual Independent Bus configuration, so they do get double the bandwidth. The only truly fair way of comparing would be a quad core AMD chip against a quad core Intel chip, but we obviously have to wait on AMD there. It's certainly going to be an interesting matchup later this year.Note that in 2008, Intel will use a quad bus topology similar to HyperTransport, at least on paper, so they are certainly aware of the bus bandwidth problems right now. I'm not sure FB-DIMMs are really helping matters either unless you use huge memory footprints. So FB-DIMMs can be good in the real world but bad for benchmarks that don't utilize all the available RAM.
DigitalFreak - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
FB-DIMMs are also un-godly expensive if you need to have 16+ GB in a 2U box. With the Opteron boxes, you tend to have many more DIMM slots, so you can use lower capacity DIMMs.yyrkoon - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I thought my eyes were decieving me, so I had to go back and look at the charts. AMD CPUs are capable or more transactions per second ? Wow. Granted, AMD CPUs also seem to use more power, but they also seem to have a 'better' CPU usage curve.I suppose most companies, and enterprises would probably opt for the intel, based on long term power savings, and probably have an Opteron machine or two, where performance was critical.
It is nice to know, that AMD still does something better than intel. Makes me feel better about buying an Opteron 1210 for my desktop, even if it isnt a socket F Opteron . . .
Phynaz - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
No.
The tested SYSTEM is capable of more transactions per second.
defter - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
You mean that four top of the line AMD cpus were outperforming two second fastest Intel's CPUs?Clovertown's performance is very impressive, since according to those results two top of the line 2.66GHz Clowertowns would match performance of four 2.8GHz Opteron.
Viditor - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
It may be less impressive than you think as 4 dual core 2.4GHz Opterons beat 2 quad core 2.33GHz Clovertowns (by 16%).
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
I'm not sure where you get that comparison. Four dual core 2.8 GHz Opterons beat two 2.33 GHz Clovertown by 16% - in certain situations.Viditor - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
If you scroll up a few posts in this thread, you'll see the quote and link...
"...Two 2.4GHz Opteron 880 processors are as fast as one Xeon 5345, but four Opterons outperform the dual quad core Xeon by 16%..."
JarredWalton - Friday, March 30, 2007 - link
Ah, right. I think that's part of what Ross was talking about when he discusses the difficulties in coming up with appropriates tests for these systems. The Forum and Dell Store benchmarks had some serious issues, likely related to optimizations and I/O activity. There are instances where Intel does better, and of course others where they do worse.