Linux and EM64T; Intel's 64-bit Suggestion
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 9, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Conclusions
Although the Athlon 64 3500+ and the Xeon 3.6GHz EM64T processors were not necessarily designed to compete against each other, we found that comparing the two CPUs was more appropriate than anticipated, particularly in the light of Intel's newest move to bring EM64T to the Pentium 4 line. Once we obtain a sample of the Pentium 4 3.6F, we expect our benchmarks to produce very similar results to the 3.6 Xeon tested for this review.Without a doubt, the 3.6GHz Xeon trounces over the Athlon 64 3500+ in math-intensive synthetic benchmarks. Again, not that it is really a comparison between the two chips yet anyway, but perhaps something of a marker of things to come. However, real world benchmarks, with the exception of John the Ripper is where AMD came ahead instead. Even though John uses several different optimizations to generate hashes, in every case, the Athlon chip found itself at least 40% behind. Much of this is likely attributed to the additional math tweaking in the Prescott family core, and the lack of optimizations at compile time.
That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less. The 3.6F processor the Xeon represents does not even exist in retail channels yet. Also, keep in mind that the AMD processor is clocked 1400MHz slower than the 3.6GHz Xeon. With only a few exceptions, synthetically the 3.6GHz Xeon outperformed our Athlon 64 3500+, whether or not the cost and thermal issues between these two processors are justifiable.
We will benchmark some SMP 3.6GHz Xeons against a pair of Opterons in the near future, so check back regularly for new benchmarks!
Update: We have addressed the issue with the -02 compile options in TSCP, the miscopy from previous benchmarks of the MySQL benchmark, and various other issues here and there in the testing of this processor. Expect a follow up article as soon as possible with an Opteron.
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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.