AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 2: Enterprise Performance

The Contenders: Opteron 244 vs. Xeon DP 2.80

You should already be familiar with the three flavors of Opterons that were just recently launched, but as a quick recap here they are in all of their confusing-model-number glory:

Note that all three of these CPUs are 1MB L2 parts, there haven't been any announcements for smaller cache versions. AMD did mention a while ago that the K8 core would not be paired up with any more than a 1MB L2 cache, presumably because of the low-latency memory access that is made possible by the on-die memory controller.

Keep in mind that mass-market availability of the Opteron 244 isn't planned until June, with the 242/240 available today.

The Opteron chips were paired up with an AMD-8000 based motherboard made by Rioworks.

In the opposing corner we have Intel's Xeon DP running at 2.80GHz; Intel could not provide us with any of the newer 3.06GHz samples in time for this review, but we will make an effort to explain where the 3.06GHz would fall in the performance spectrum when possible. These are 512KB L2 parts, although Intel has accelerated the introduction of their 1MB L2 Xeon DP to next month in order to compete with AMD's Opteron. The first 1MB L2 Xeon DP part will debut at 3.06GHz and will make for a very interesting comparison to the Opteron 244.

The Xeon DPs were installed on an Intel E7501 based motherboard; for those not familiar with the E7501 chipset (Plumas-533), its major features are as follows:

- Dual Processor Xeon support (400/533MHz FSB)
- 2 x 64-bit DDR266 memory channels

We tested all processors in dual processor mode, with Hyper-Threading enabled on the Xeon platform.

With the test platforms clearly defined, let's get a taste for Opteron's performance…