Benchmarks: AMD's 45nm 'Shanghai' Opteron

Christoph Hochstätter ZDNet Germany

Published: 20 Nov 2008

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Go to section: Introduction Virtualisation compatibility Expanded L3 cache Arithmetic performance Memory performance Virtualisation Conclusion

Arithmetic performance: just behind Intel's Core 2 architecture
ZDNet tested a two-processor system with a Supermicro H8DM8-2 board. The system has two 2.7GHz Shanghai Opteron 2384 processors with 16GB RAM. Comparison systems were a Mac Pro with two 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon E5462 'Harpertown' processors and 16GB of RAM, and an Intel four-processor board with the 7300 'Caneland' chipset and two Xeon X7460 'Dunnington' processors, each with six 2.66GHz cores. The test system had a single SATA disk.

The 2.7GHz AMD Shanghai system consumes 183W when idle and 320W fully loaded. Equivalent figures for the 2.8GHz Intel Harpertown system were 190W (idle) and 320W (fully loaded). The 2.66GHz six-core Dunnington machine, with two SAS disks, drew 349W idle and 451W fully loaded.

Intel's Core 2 architecture, as used in the Xeon Harpertown and Dunnington CPUs, just about takes the lead when running arithmetic applications that make few demands on system memory (see graphs below). Intel's lead over AMD in these tests is nowhere near as clear as it was with Barcelona processors.

In the Lavalys AES benchmark, which tests integer performance, the Shanghai system delivers a score of 36,908 ponts — some 11 percent behind Harpertown, which is 100MHz faster. The Dunnington system comes out well ahead, with a 67 percent advantage. But this comparison is not strictly fair, since the Dunnington system not only has four more cores but also 32MB of Level 3 cache in total, which allows it to cope without making many demands on system memory.

In the single-precision arithmetic Lavalys Julia benchmark, the Shanghai system with SSE scores 12,813, 35 per cent below Harpertown and 46 per cent below Dunnington. With SSE instructions, Intel usually exhibits a far higher performance than AMD. In the more relevant double-precision arithmetic tests of the Lavalys Mandelbrot benchmark, Shanghai with SSE2 is only 12 percent behind Harpertown and 62 percent behind Dunnington.

Go to section: Introduction Virtualisation compatibility Expanded L3 cache Arithmetic performance Memory performance Virtualisation Conclusion

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