Quad core AMD chips against Intel's offerings

Sep 28, 2007 14:09 GMT  ·  By

Which is better, AMD or Intel? This question is the driving force that led to the recently consumed price war and now it leads to a whole new series of benchmarks and comparisons between the newest quad core Advanced Micro Devices processors aimed at servers and their Intel made counterparts. In order to come up with a unified way of measuring processors' performance under controlled conditions, the latest offerings from AMD and Intel were benchmarked by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. and the results were in the range that was pretty much expected by all users.

It looks like the AMD processors once again are leading in the floating point operations department, while Intel is pretty much the dominating force when it comes to integer operations. As Intel recently released a compiler that is specially optimized for its processors, the latest benchmarks that were run on dual processor machines are showing that AMD's advantages are rapidly fading away and that the smaller company should come up with a new action plan as quick as possible.

According to the news site xbitlabs, that cites results posted on the Spec.org site, when it comes down to processors running at the same clock speed running integer aimed test, Intel made products are getting ahead of the AMD offerings. At the same time, when running floating point centered tests it looks like the Advanced Micro Devices processors are leading Intel made ones by around 26 percent.

When testing a dual processor server based on two AMD Opteron 2350 CPUs that run at 2.0GHz and comparing the results with the ones from a machine based on two Intel Xeon X5365 chips that run at 3GHz, it becomes clear that the AMD powered computer system is about 12 percent faster in the CFP2006, but the roles are definitely inversed when comparing results from the CINT2006 benchmarking tests.

As Intel is about to release a new generation of quad core processing units that are built using the 45 nanometer fabrication process and because these new products are coming with increased cache memories and faster frontside bus operating frequencies as well as increased overall running frequencies, the big processor manufacturing company will soon find its position even more solid.

On the other side AMD is not really a sitting duck, as it prepares to deliver an Opteron processor that will operate at 2.5GHz in a few months and if this is true, that range of processors may be able to maintain a small measure of advantage over Intel's top offerings in floating point operations, but at the same time there are almost no chances that the Opteron line will be able to outperform the Xeons in integer based tests.