This week, AMD and Intel launched their latest generation of high-end server chips.
The AMD Opteron 6000 (Magny-Cours) is a set of 8- and 12-core processors for dual- and quad-CPU servers. Not to be outdone, Intel has introduced the 8-core processor Xeon 7500 (Westmere), that could be deployed in mammoth 256-processor configurations.
To help us understand the differences between these 2 competing family of chips, we asked Insight64 analyst, Nathan Brookwod to share his views on these latest chips.
In 2-socket configurations, AMD delivers better performance despite Intel’s faster cores
AMD Magny-Cours (now the Opteron 6100) for both two socket and four socket configurations.
In the two-socket world, AMD faces Westmere-EP (Xeon 5600), which has six cores and twelve threads. Westmere’s cores are faster than Magny-Cours’ cores. Westmere wins some single-threaded contests, but AMD can overwhelm them if it gets to fire up all its cores, or if memory bandwidth or capacity is an issue.
In 4-socket configurations, AMD wins in price but Intel can scale to 64-sockets!
In the four-socket world, AMD faces Nehalem-EX, aka Becton, which has eight cores and sixteen threads. Becton’s cores are faster than Magny-Cours’ cores, and Intel has more on-chip cache (24MB to AMD’s 12MB) but AMD has 12 cores to Intel’s 8, and AMD charges the same price for the chips in 2P and 4P systems, while Intel charges almost 2x the price (per chip) for Becton, compared with Westmere-EP. Magny-Cours will win some benchmarks against Becton, and lose some, but it will always be less expensive. Some customers will value Intel’s greater expandability (to 8, 16 and 64-socket arrangements) and others will be attracted to AMD’s lower price.
Can Itanium survive to latest performance onslaught?
Brookwood’s law (“It’s easier to measure price than performance”) will give AMD an advantage in the two-way and four-way segments, but Becton will have almost no competition (other than Itanium and Power 7) for the higher-end niche of the server market. It’s hard to see how Itanium can survive for long against this Xeon onslaught.
The AMD versus Intel battle is a hot topic in the computing industry that has been fiercely discussed for many years. However, there has never been a clear winner, and it looks like it is just going to run and run. AMDvsIntel.co.uk has a series of articles discussing various aspects of this fascinating debate.