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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Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I thought that the Athlon64 did not have the integrated memory controller. That's the big difference between the Opteron and the Atlon64, in single processor quantities.Wesley Fink - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
The latest runors at the Inquirer and Xbit Labs have the Athlon64 FX launching at 2.2GHz, which seems to be the rumor consensus :-) I have an Asus SK8N board I am testing now with an Opteron, and it supports both ECC and non-ECC memory - but it appears it MUST be fed Registered memory. This means regular unbuffered memory will not likely work on the Opteron based CPU's.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Interesting. And isnt the Athlon64 FX supposed to be running at 2.3 ghz? Add in support for Non ECC memory (which is slower) and color me interested.And here I was all set on buying a new 3.0ghz P4 system in a couple of weeks... <sigh>
WheelsCSM - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Looks pretty good, how much are these things supposed to cost?sandorski - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Sounds good! Hopefully the Athlon 64 *will* perform in a similar manner.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Oh, nevermind. Disregard #3. I understand what you're saying now.Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
"Our reference board includes full support for Dual-Channel DDR ECC memory, and the Athlon64 version will also support non-ECC memory"When it says "Athlon64" here is it referring to Athlon64 FX (Socket 940)? I thought that Athlon64 FX is basically an Opteron. And Opteron requires registered DIMMs with ECC.
Anonymous User - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Awesome preview Wes, i can't wait to get one of these bad boys to play with after the 23rd, hopefully in the prommie!!keep up the good work.
Tony
(bigtoe)
AgaBooga - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
I wonder when Intel will respond to these articles on Athlon 64 with some Prescott previews