Intel "Harpertown" Xeon vs. AMD "Barcelona" Opteron
by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on September 18, 2007 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
Finally we had an opportunity to pit two quad-core parts from the CPU giants against each other and see who has the better part. The question is, what makes a better processor? Is it how quickly it can accomplish a given workload? Is it how much performance it offers over how much it costs? Is it how much performance it offers over how much power it consumes? The answer is more than likely all of the above in some proportion.
Performance
Intel has made some successful changes to the quad-core Xeon that have helped it achieve as much as a 56% lead in performance over the 2.0GHz Barcelona part. Of course this is mostly due to the fact that the Harpertown part has a 1GHz clock speed advantage, and the various micro-architecture tweaks surely help fill in the rest. It's clear that AMD has potential with Barcelona, and it will be extremely interesting to see where they end up as clock-speed ramps. With 2.5GHz parts due out before the end of the year, the difference between AMD and Intel may not be all that great - barring any other announcements, of course.
Performance / Watt
AMD has always been extremely strong in performance/watt, especially at the lower load levels and even more so at idle. Barcelona uses the least amount of watts at idle and manages to come close to the new Harpertown parts on AS3AP; however, Intel due to its 1GHz clock advantage takes the lead on every other benchmark, particularly at higher loads. Again, AMD needs to ramp clock speed in order to compete with Intel, and it looks like that will happen over the next few months. The question is, will it come soon enough to start winning back some market-share?
Price
While Barcelona is still difficult to get ahold of, the expected price of the Opteron 2350 should be around $400. Harpertown is brand new, so we're not yet able to find any prices in the retail market, but the expected price for the E5472 will be around $1000 when the 1600FSB parts launch. The new Harpertown E5430 (2.66GHz) is expected to cost close to $450 while the E5420 (2.33GHz) will cost closer to $320. FB-DIMMs carry a slight price premium over registered DDR2-667 ECC memory, but these days RAM prices are pretty much comparable. The bottom line is that for 2S systems, it appears that AMD may have a small pricing advantage at the low-end (at least until any Intel price cuts occur). However, considering the overall cost of a well equipped 2S server/workstation, saving a few hundred dollars for equivalent performance may not be enough to sway purchasing decisions.
Two weeks ago, AMD's standing in the IT world was definitely in question. Barcelona may not be the knockout punch that many were hoping for, but it definitely makes them far more competitive. The fact that Barcelona is a drop-in replacement for existing Socket-F systems certainly doesn't hurt, although we could say the same thing about Harpertown and existing Intel Core systems. There is of course one area where AMD still does have an advantage: 4-way and higher server configurations, where their Direct Connect topology has some distinct advantages that may not be overcome for quite some time. All we need now is to see how fast AMD can ramp up production and availability of Barcelona, and how far they are able to push clock speeds. It will still be difficult for them to gain market share, but at least they should be able to stop the bleeding and hopefully return to profitability.
Update: For those that are looking for more details and wondering why certain other chips aren't included, at the time testing was conducted we did not have any of the faster 2.5GHz Barcelona chips (or the slower Harpertowns). That situation has been remedied in terms of AMD's CPUs, and we will have some update articles looking at how the faster Barcelona compares with other processors. Stay tuned....
Finally we had an opportunity to pit two quad-core parts from the CPU giants against each other and see who has the better part. The question is, what makes a better processor? Is it how quickly it can accomplish a given workload? Is it how much performance it offers over how much it costs? Is it how much performance it offers over how much power it consumes? The answer is more than likely all of the above in some proportion.
Performance
Intel has made some successful changes to the quad-core Xeon that have helped it achieve as much as a 56% lead in performance over the 2.0GHz Barcelona part. Of course this is mostly due to the fact that the Harpertown part has a 1GHz clock speed advantage, and the various micro-architecture tweaks surely help fill in the rest. It's clear that AMD has potential with Barcelona, and it will be extremely interesting to see where they end up as clock-speed ramps. With 2.5GHz parts due out before the end of the year, the difference between AMD and Intel may not be all that great - barring any other announcements, of course.
Performance / Watt
AMD has always been extremely strong in performance/watt, especially at the lower load levels and even more so at idle. Barcelona uses the least amount of watts at idle and manages to come close to the new Harpertown parts on AS3AP; however, Intel due to its 1GHz clock advantage takes the lead on every other benchmark, particularly at higher loads. Again, AMD needs to ramp clock speed in order to compete with Intel, and it looks like that will happen over the next few months. The question is, will it come soon enough to start winning back some market-share?
Price
While Barcelona is still difficult to get ahold of, the expected price of the Opteron 2350 should be around $400. Harpertown is brand new, so we're not yet able to find any prices in the retail market, but the expected price for the E5472 will be around $1000 when the 1600FSB parts launch. The new Harpertown E5430 (2.66GHz) is expected to cost close to $450 while the E5420 (2.33GHz) will cost closer to $320. FB-DIMMs carry a slight price premium over registered DDR2-667 ECC memory, but these days RAM prices are pretty much comparable. The bottom line is that for 2S systems, it appears that AMD may have a small pricing advantage at the low-end (at least until any Intel price cuts occur). However, considering the overall cost of a well equipped 2S server/workstation, saving a few hundred dollars for equivalent performance may not be enough to sway purchasing decisions.
Two weeks ago, AMD's standing in the IT world was definitely in question. Barcelona may not be the knockout punch that many were hoping for, but it definitely makes them far more competitive. The fact that Barcelona is a drop-in replacement for existing Socket-F systems certainly doesn't hurt, although we could say the same thing about Harpertown and existing Intel Core systems. There is of course one area where AMD still does have an advantage: 4-way and higher server configurations, where their Direct Connect topology has some distinct advantages that may not be overcome for quite some time. All we need now is to see how fast AMD can ramp up production and availability of Barcelona, and how far they are able to push clock speeds. It will still be difficult for them to gain market share, but at least they should be able to stop the bleeding and hopefully return to profitability.
Update: For those that are looking for more details and wondering why certain other chips aren't included, at the time testing was conducted we did not have any of the faster 2.5GHz Barcelona chips (or the slower Harpertowns). That situation has been remedied in terms of AMD's CPUs, and we will have some update articles looking at how the faster Barcelona compares with other processors. Stay tuned....
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Xspringe - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
Except in this particular case, based on the available data, this does not make sense at all. Power requirements of the AMD system are already lower then that of the Xeons (including the extra fans and ram), so these extra fans should not be required.Proteusza - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
Hello? Anandtech? can we have some justification for the difference in test beds and the fact that performance per watt is now completely meaningless?Or are you just going to let this one slide?
Justin Case - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
A difference of 50 watts would be enough to push the efficiency (performance per watt) of the Barcelona system above that of the Harpertown system in most of the benchmarks used in the article.DeepThought86 - Tuesday, September 18, 2007 - link
Wow if these numbers are representative then Barcelona is killing Intel, even at 45nm, on a $/performance basis and has great perf/watt too. A 2.5 GHz Barcelona will match anything Intel has until 2008 and a 3GHz Barcelona will obliterate them, period.Looks like Harpertown isn't enough to match AMD if they can get it scaled quickly. I think AMD will be making large server marketshare gains going forward until Nehalem is introduced. Great news for buyers!
defter - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
Yeah right, because 3GHz Xeon has a 40-55% lead against 2GHz Barcelona, you will think that 2.5GHz (+20% clockspeed) Barcelona will overtake 3.2GHz Xeon?It's quite funny, two years ago when Intel was selling Netburst dual cores for $150-200 while AMD charged over $300 for a cheapest dual core CPU, nobody cared about performance/$ benchmarks :)
But now some fanbois are making up "performance/$", "performance/$/watt/clock", "performance/watt/Ruiz's IQ" metrics just to artificically boost AMD's poor CPU. This is enthusiast site, most people care also about which product is a simply faster, that's why omitting expensive or 120W CPUs from the reviews is a bit silly. Fastest CPU from manufacturer A vs. fastest CPU from manufacturer B is always a fair game.
Proteusza - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
As the other guy said, its 25%, also, theres the fact that 1 AMD MHz is not equal to 1 Intel MHz.This may seem like utter fanboy crap, until you consider that a 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo generally outperforms a 3 GHz Intel Pentium 4.
Similar thing with how a K8 beat the pants off an equivalently clocked P4, and it looks like Barcelona is a very good performer.
You need to study computer architecture to understand why, but until then, keep your ignorance to yourself.
defter - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
This is true, my mistake.
Here is your mistake, I was talking about percentage point increases, not MHz increases.
Ok, let's look back at example:
2GHz Barcelona performance: 1
3GHz Xeon performance: 1.4-1.55 (40-55% faster)
assuming perfect scaling:
2.5GHz Barcelona performance: 1.25 (in reality it will be less, since scaling is not perfect)
As you can see, even 2.5GHz Barcelona will not be as fast as current Xeons.
Why? Even the future 2.5GHz parts will be slow compared to competition.
You can look here for benchmarks between a future 2.5GHz Barcelona and 3GHz 45nm Xeon: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13224/1">http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13224/1
Barcelona loses every real world test, in many tests it's significantly behind Xeon. Even when taking FB-DIMMs into account, Xeon has a lower power under load in Povray test.
And 3GHz Xeon isn't even a top speed part, in November Intel will introduce 3.16GHz quad core Xeon with faster parts coming later.
The fact is that AMD needs >3GHz Barcelonas in November, just to achieve parity with Xeon.
Spoelie - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
server vs desktopon the desktop, barcelona will have a) a faster memory controller b) faster clocks c) faster memory (ddr667 on the server, ddr800 and ddr1066 on the desktop)
yes for desktop apps k10 needs more or less clock parity, but the original poster alluded to the target market for the opterons.
Proteusza - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
K I see what you saying about relative performance.In most cases Barcelona seems to perform equal to an approximately equivalently clocked Harpertown.
So when a harpertown chip has a 50% clockspeed advantage, its going to beat any AMD chip until said AMD chip gets up to equal clockspeeds (approximately).
Nonetheless, I think its performance per watt figures should be pretty interesting, and I'm glad it generally outperforms a Clovertown at equivalent speeds. If it couldnt do that, it would be a dead duck.
flyck - Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - link
You are correct when you are talking about performance only related stuff. However barcelona won't be that far behind. Performance/wat will be better (is allready better if you consider that the more memory the worse the situation gets for intel).Why? Even the future 2.5GHz parts will be slow compared to competition
That sin't true. They will be very competive when we are talking about performance/W.
And i think that amd will be very performance competive vs intel when they can reach the 2.8GHz-3Ghz ratios which are due for start of the coming year. (especially when faster registerd ram is available).
Another comment that i would like to place is that on techreport you can hardly speak about server based benchmarks. although it does point out that amd will need frequency equality to be competive in the fanatic sector.