AMD's dual core Opteron & Athlon 64 X2 - Server/Desktop Performance Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on April 21, 2005 9:25 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Earlier this month, Intel introduced their first dual core desktop CPUs - the Pentium D and the Pentium Extreme Edition. Coupled with extremely aggressive pricing designed to move the majority of the desktop market to dual core within the next two years, Intel's launch did not cease to impress. The ability to bring workstation class performance in multithreaded and multitasking environments to the desktop, at an affordable price, is something that we've been hoping for for years. Intel's launch was pretty interesting, but today, AMD has more bang.
From the beginning, AMD has talked about how they were going to bring dual core to the K8 architecture. The on-die north bridge, a part of every Athlon 64 and Opteron CPU, was designed from the ground up to be able to support multiple cores. AMD had designed their first dual core K8 CPUs years ago. They were simply waiting for manufacturing processes to mature in order to actually make producing such a chip a feasible endeavor.
With their 90nm process finally maturing, it made business and financial sense to introduce their first dual core products. AMD wasn't alone in their decision, as it's obvious that Intel waited for 90nm before making their move to dual core as well. The problem for both AMD and Intel is that at 90nm, a dual core chip is getting a bit on the large side. Intel's first dual core CPUs weigh in at 230 million transistors on a 206 mm2 die, and AMD's new CPUs are a bit obese themselves at 233.2 million transistors on a 199 mm2 die. While the dual core CPUs that we have tested from both AMD and Intel are no slouch, it's clear that both companies are working to transition to 65nm as quickly as possible to make manufacturing these chips much more reasonable.
Although this may seem like a tangent to the topic at hand, manufacturing has a lot to do with today's announcements from AMD. What exactly is being announced? Well, for starters, AMD is announcing their first dual core Opteron parts. The word "announcing" in this sense means that they are declaring availability of their 800 series dual core Opteron CPUs, and promising that 200 and 100 series dual core Opteron CPUs will be made available starting next month. Before we move on to the rest of the announcement, pay very close attention to the parts for which AMD is announcing availability - the 800 series parts. The Opteron 800 series CPUs are for use in 4 or more socket servers and are AMD's most expensive CPUs, and thus, their lowest volume CPUs. Remember that at 90nm, AMD can produce around half as many dual core CPUs as they can single core CPUs per wafer - so they need to be very careful about demand. You will notice later on in this article that AMD's strategy involves keeping prices higher and introducing lower quantity CPUs first, in order to ensure that their single core CPUs still have a market and that they aren't committing to more than what they can deliver. At the end of the day, AMD is still a much smaller manufacturer than Intel and thus, they have to play their cards very differently, which leads us to the second part of AMD's announcement today: the new dual core desktop Athlon 64 X2 line.
The Athlon 64 X2 will be AMD's new brand for dual core desktop CPUs. This line is being talked about today, but an official announcement with full benchmarks won't come until June. That being said, we have made it a point to bring you a preview of Athlon 64 X2 performance in this article, despite the fact that AMD isn't introducing the chips for another two months. So, for all of you who are interested to see how AMD's dual core desktop CPUs stack up against the recently introduced Pentium D, never fear, we have what you're looking for.
This article will serve two purposes. First and foremost, we're interested in the new dual core Opterons as a server solution - and we run them through our usual web and database serving tests. Next, we're going to take a look at the Athlon 64 X2 and how it compares in performance to Intel's recently announced Pentium D. We've developed even more desktop multitasking tests for this article, so we'll be able to provide you with an idea of how well AMD will be able to compete in the multi-core world.
- The Athlon 64 4000+ was the last single core member of the Athlon 64 line.
- The Athlon 64 FX will continue as a single core CPU line, with the FX-57 (2.8GHz) due out later this year.
We are missing a look at workstation performance between the Opteron and Xeon, but rest assured that such a comparison is in the works. The usual mix of very limited time and hardware problems (which we will also discuss in this article) forced us to exclude one of the comparisons, and thus, the workstation comparison will have to wait for another day.
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cHodAXUK - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Anand, Jason and Ross.. hell of a job guys, you have out done yourselves. As for the X2 4400+ preview results, holy shit is all I can say, better than I expected and those scores are WITHOUT the aid of an NCQ enabled drive. The cost is high, very high infact but the X2 just scales so much better than the equivelent Intel. All I want to see now is an X2 4400+ with the FSB overclocked to DDR500 speeds, I am really interested to see how much that extra 1gb/s+ of bandwidth helps a dual core setup. Perhaps that is something you can look into for us please Anand and Co? T.I.A. ;)Darth Farter - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
http://www.hardwaregeeks.com/comments.php?catid=1&...[quote]:
Current Intel Price List(3)
Price in
1,000 unit
Performance Processors quantities
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.33 GHz with 8 MB L3 cache $3692
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.00 GHz with 8 MB L3 cache $1980
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 2.83 GHz with 4 MB L3 cache $1177
Value Processors
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.66 GHz with 1 MB L2 cache $963
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.16 GHz with 1 MB L2 cache $722
[/quote]
Intel's not too shabby with pricing either... ;)
btw Dual OPTERON vs 4way(?) XEON @ techreport
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/i...
Groovester - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
65- Recommend you reread "A Look at AMD's Dual Core Architecture" page. The fact that AMD's Athlon64 and X2 memory controllers are on-die gives it a leg up on Intel's Pentium D's. On the X2, the communication between the two cores doesn't have to traverse the external FSB.bob661 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
WHOODOGGIE!!!Quanticles - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
68 - he did the best he could, but the point is the same... lol. we're going to see some pretty amazing preformance from the real thingSon of a N00b - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
hit me up with one of these, four vid cards, some headphones and a 24' screen for hours of gaming bliss....w00t!anyway i can actually see also a game suddenly coming out written for dual core, with the developers pulling something outta their collective a$$'s....
I'll wait for these to get a bit more refined though and the pwnage is clear that a dual core offers total uberness...
good article anand...almost to complete lol...i actually have to save some time in my day to read em....gj!
fishbits - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
From the article: "Although the use of ECC memory and a workstation motherboard would inevitably mean that performance will be slower than what will be when the real Athlon 64 X2s launch, its close enough to get a good idea of the competitiveness of the Athlon 64 X2."Anand didn't "cripple" or "misrepresent" anything. He got as close as he could with the materials available to him, and made it clear that some liberties/extrapolation would be required.
However, it does look promising that the X2 will perform even better than projected today. Just as Anand said up front.
KillerBob - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
You are right Griswold, and it was in these tests the Intel won the race;)Zebo - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Expect at least 15% more performance when real X2 is released.Anand crippled/misrepresented it by running a 175 in his tests... Which has ECC memory, 2T, and my guess is 3-3-3 (most all ECC ram is 3-3-3 since he does'nt say I must go with the odds).
Talk about hamstringing a A64. Anands own tests show just how crippleing 2T is for A64 upwards of 10% alone less performance. I've shown 3-3-3 vs 2-2-2 to be signifigant in my mem matrix tread about 5% since A64's love low latency. ECC knocks out about 3-5% more performance due to extra wait state. Would the "real" X2 debuting at 18% faster be unfair?? I don't think so when paired with desktop memory.
It's going to get REAL ugly on the desktop for Team Blue no matter how you slice the numbers when a real live X2 comes with un-buffered mem, LL and 1T since Intel already loses to a unadventurous server chip right now.
Fricardo - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
64 - I'd like to know the same. I definitely won't buy a processor for more than 250, no matter what the performance is. I'm sure they'll drop eventually, but I wonder if that'll happen before 939 is completely obsolete and I have to buy an M2 mobo anyways...Also, something I've been wondering: if dual core does have such an impressive effect on desktop performance and future programs will be multithreaded to take advantage of dual core, how come nobody ever talks about making multi-socket desktop boards? A dual-939 setup with a couple of $120 OC'd Winnie's would be just as fast as the X-2 and a heck of a lot cheaper. Or you could slap a couple of X-2's in there when they actually come out and have sick performance.