14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent announcement, AMD's new low-power Opteron processors, codenamed “Shanghai HE,” use 13 to 21 percent less power than similar solutions provided by Intel through its Xeon processors, while delivering a batter throughput. The reported results have been provided after extensive testing performed by Neal Nelson, an independent computer performance consultant. The report comes to provide a professional perspective on the performance capabilities and the power requirements of both AMD and Intel server processors.
“The AMD based server beat the Intel based server in our tests. We processed millions of transactions against a real database and we measured the total throughput and the total power used by the servers. We are certain of the accuracy of our test results and we provide our customers with a money back guarantee. If a system under-performs in the real world, we will take it back and refund the purchase price,” commented Neal Nelson.
The two platforms were tested in three different work modes, for better results. These include a calculation intensive workload, a disk I/O intensive workload and the “idle” state when the server was powered up and waiting for transactions to arrive. According to the report, the test was realized with both 4GB and 16GB memory configurations. The configurations of the servers were virtually identical, only that the Intel CPU was clocked at 2.5GHz, while the AMD processor had a core speed of 2.31 GHz. Also, the Intel server used “Fully Buffered” memory(FB-DIMMs).
The results of the Nelson server test favored AMD's Opteron processors which reported 1.0 to 6.3 higher throughput in the calculation intensive workload. The power consumption was also a strong point for the Opteron processor, in every test. According to the report, the AMD server CPUs recorded a range of 13.1 to 20.8 percent in the power consumption tests.