Linux and EM64T; Intel's 64-bit Suggestion
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 9, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Audio Encoding
Lame was compiled from source without optimizations. We only ran ./configure and make, without any flags. We realize that some people would like to verify our binaries and sample files for their own benchmarks. In order to save bandwidth and prevent copyright infractions, we will provide our test files and binaries under limited circumstances to serious inquiries. We ran lame on a 700MB .wav file using the command equivalent to the one below:# lame sample.wav -b 192 -m s -h >/dev/null
Encoding time, lower is better.
POV-RAY
Although POV-RAY is limited in application (particularly when compared against Mental Ray), it does provide a free open source solution for basic rendering. POV-Ray 3.50c was our choice of render engine for this benchmark. For benchmark specifics, we run the exact benchmark as specified by the POV-Ray official site. We use the precompiled RPM for this test.Render Time in Seconds, less is better.
POV-Ray does not have multithread support, so we were not surprised to see the HyperThreading configuration slowing down to the configuration without HT. We see the Athlon 64 processor pull way ahead; render tasks are extremely CPU and memory dependant. With the memory controller on the CPU, Athlon 64 becomes the stronger offering in this situation.
GZip
To throw in some rudimentary tests for GZip, we used the included GZip 1.3.5 to compress the .wav file from the benchmark above. We do not want to limit our I/O on writing to the hard drive, so the operation is performed as below:# time gzip -c sample.wav > /dev/null
Intel wins their first bout of the analysis, albeit not by much. We will find a recurring pattern later on with integer based calculations and the Nocona Xeon processor. The entire Prescott family of Intel CPUs received a dedicated integer multiplier rather than continually using the floating point multiplier. This becomes extremely useful in some of our other benchmarks.
Database Performance
We will run the standard SQL-bench suite included with RPM MySQL 4.0.20d.
Of all our benchmarks, the SQL-bench becomes the most baffling. The extremely threaded database application performs particularly poorly with HyperThreading enabled. The Althon 64 outperforms Intel again in this benchmark, and a lot of it is almost certainly accredited to the on die memory controller again.
Update: We copied the 32-bit marks from our benchmark in previous testing instead of the 64-bit. You can view the previous articles here from a month ago. The graphs have also been updated.
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JGunther - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
What the hell is the matter with you guys? I mean, I'm all for a good CPU wars, but comparing a desktop CPU to a server CPU? I mean, we're talking a $350 CPU vs. an $850 CPU. How, by any stretch of the imagination, is this a good comparison??Oh. my. god. Anandtech... I'm starting to wonder about this site. First you guys blast RAID 0 on the desktop (which Tweakers.Net just stated was COMPLETELY misleading in their own, more extensive battery of tests) and now this?
Man... this isn't even a question of AMD vs. Intel. The only people who would think that this is a decent comparison have to be Intel fanboys or something.
How did this get to print?
Viditor - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
Soultrap - "The reason the benchmarks come out faster on the Intel part is because of it's higher clock."This is what I thought at first too...
The problem is that the benches being reproduced around the web for the A64 don't match up to Kris's...
menads - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
#101 The mistakes in the results has nothing to do with the Intel clockspeed - it is the reviewer lack of knowledge how to use gcc (and its flags) and to understand what the benchmarks measure. And finally the poor judgement of selecting a badly positioned desktop CPU (even 754 pin 3400+ makes much more sense than the 3500+ used in the review let alone Opteron 150) versus the top end server CPU.manno - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
"This is a sad day for all of us. Anandtech has now lost all credibility as an independent review site. First THG, now Anandtech, WTF is going on in the world? :("Get a life.
Soultrap - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
The reason the benchmarks come out faster on the Intel part is because of it's higher clock. If you do the math you will see that the scores are proportional to the clock frequency on the benchmarks that the Intel part stomped the AMD part. This does not make the Intel part better then the AMD part! But, it does make it (much) faster a doing very simple tasks. The more complex the task is the more important all of the other features of the chip become. The "other" features is where the AMD chip realy shines, not in core frequency. (shorter pipeline, better instruction management, better memory access, ...)In any benchmark that truely uses the processor as a computer and not as simple calculator, like just about any of the gaming benchmarks out there you will find that in even comparisons (apples to apples) the Intel will be falling behind. When 64bit is mature you will realy see the weakness of Intel's 64 bit clunker.
By the way, just how much did you get paid by Intel to do this cornhole of a reveiw?
Never mind, I am sure they promised that you would disappear if you told on them.
Just kidding!
But really "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth then lies." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietshe
And I beleive that when it comes to AMD vs Intel there are alot of convictions in the IT world.
bhtooefr - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
#48, you're not going to see Doom 3 benchies because Doom 3 doesn't run on Linux, and even if it did, it'd be a regular x86 app, not x86-64/EM64T.chaosengine - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
Yeah its really sorry to see this. I joined anandtech right now to post this damn message!!!So what next will we have? Since when sane people have started comparing Server chips against Desktop Chips???
I thought anandtech was much less biased than others but sadly not the case.
dougSF30 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
Problems with primegen benchmark:http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?me...
"
What Anand's "primegen" was actually measuring:
*locking* and *unlocking* of the thread-safe version of putchar() was the bottleneck.
switching to unlocked putchar made the benchmark run twice as fast.
commenting out the putchar stuff entirely resulted in another factor of 2 faster.
So:
50% of time involves locking.
25% of time involved input/output
25% of time was actually doing arithmetic, calculating primes.
Gosh, I wonder if The Prescott New Instructions MONITOR and MWAIT have anything to do with the selection of this benchmark, and the performance of Nocona?
http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115093892
"
snorre - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
This is a sad day for all of us. Anandtech has now lost all credibility as an independent review site. First THG, now Anandtech, WTF is going on in the world? :(DrMrLordX - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link
In response to #93,I don't see 3500+ vs Opteron 150 being minor. It means the reviewer actually believes AMD's stupid PR scheme. Their PR scheme has always been wrong, and will likely always be wrong. The 3500+ is a glaring example of how screwed-up their PR scheme can get. Aside from dual-channel memory support, the 3500+ for socket 939 is the same cpu as the 3200+ Newcastle for socket 754. Previous Anandtech articles have highlighted this fact. Not only does KK's choice of cpus potray AMD as being in a position of weakness(somehow implying that AMD has nothing better to offer than the 3500+, that it's only purpose in the market is that its cheaper than Intel "just like always", etc), but it casts Intel in an unfavorable light by giving it a truly unworthy opponent. The 3500+ is a lousy processor for the price. The 3400+, which is clocked 200 mhz higher than the 3500+, is a superior CPU AND costs less. Dual-channel memory just doesn't do enough to justify any of the PR ratings AMD uses on its Socket 939 cpus.