High End Workstation Performance Commentary
Workstation performance, as measured by SPECviewperf, has been an area where Pentium 4 has dominated recently. The 2.0GHz Opteron certainly brings this area into parity at the very least, and Opteron becomes the leader in some areas. Comparing the ATI 9800 PRO performance, we find the A64 level Opteron the top performer in DRV-08 and UGS-01 benchmarks. In other SPECview tests, performance is very competitive and much faster than we have tested with the Athlon 3200+ on nForce2.To satisfy curiosity, we also compared performance of the Workstation nVidia Quadro FX2000 video card on both the dual Xeon Intel 875 platform and the single-CPU Opteron platform. You would expect that 2 Xeon 3.06 CPUs with 1MB of cache would be the clear winner of this comparison. The results, however, are quite surprising:
| SPECviewperf 7.0 Performance nVidia Quadro FX2000 Workstation Video |
Benchmark | Asus PC-DL Dual Xeon 3.06 | nForce3 Single Opteron 2.0 |
| 3DSMax | 22.17 | 21.88 |
| DRV | 59.80 | 59.80 |
| DX | 59.83 | 59.87 |
| Light | 29.88 | 25.75 |
| PROE | 27.55 | 29.18 |
| UGS | 31.39 | 28.48 |
The results are basically even, which is amazing considering we are comparing a single 2.0 GHz Opteron to Dual 3.06 Xeon with 1Mb cache. Certainly, Opteron/Athlon64 has much improved in Workstation performance compared to Athlon.
High End Workstation Performance Benchmarks
Content Creation and General Usage Performance Benchmarks
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StuckMojo - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
I'd like to see some benchmarks where the opteron's advanatges could really be used:
1) some database or rendering benchmarks on workstations with more than 4GB of ram and large worksets that use more that 4G.
x86/pentium cpus have to use a segmented memory architecture becuase of the 4G address space, so it's kind of like swapping, and is alot slower than direct access that a 64 bit chip has.
2) how about some 64bit benchmarks on linux?
Quake3 runs natively on linux, why have I seen none? Laziness, or lack of technical knowledge?
sprockkets - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Intel will have a 100w toaster oven to compete with AMD, that and probably SSE3 just to make everyone recompile and distance AMD again. That and of course a 1mb cache.Isn't that Xenon have a 1MB but L3? That means it has 1.5MB, and still lags.
PointlesS - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Impressive cpu but it would've been nice to see how much of an improvement the extra 200mhz made...unless I'm missing something here...does anyone have a link that has a 1.8ghz opteron and a 9800 pro?Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Minor correction on page 2. nForce was the first AMD based board to use HyperTransport IIRC, not the nForce2Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Hrm, as I am sure Intel has samples of the Opteron CPUs, its kinda surprising to see them not have anything significant ready to counter.. I highly doubt the Prescott will perform more than 10-20% better than the fastest Northwood P4.. If can't, then it'll definitely be slower than these new Opterons.. Let's see if Intel can counter, or else its gonna be a bloodshed for them..Evan Lieb - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
#13,Because CPU supply right now is EXTREMELY tight. Wait until the end of the month for more info on dual Opteron/A64 performance numbers. :)
Take care,
Evan
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
This is all very exciting stuff for AMD fans...but as a dually enthusiast, I wonder why there are no benchmarking stats for a top-end Athlon MP workstation/gaming solution? Why include the Xeon dually and not an Athlon dually? Certainly in the Content Creation areas we'd see a landslide for the good old dual MP mobos...imagine a 150 MHz FSB PC3200 2.6 GHz overclocked Barton 2500+ dually w/ the Radeon 9800...best price/performance ever IMHO...Wesley Fink - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
As Anand and many others have been saying for months, Athlon64 is supposed to be single-channel Socket 754 and able to use unbuffered memory. Since the rumored FX Enthusiast version is said to be Socket 940 it will fit Opteron boards like the Asus SK8N, so will be dual-channel. Thus far the only ones I have seen from these aleady RELEASED motherboards have required registered memory - ECC or non-ECC - but that could of course change with later releases.tazdevl - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Also, I was under the impression that the socket 939/940 boards will support unbuffered memory.tazdevl - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I'd like to see a temp comparison between all the CPUs.