AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 4: Desktop Performance

The Test

We kept the number of comparison candidates in this review to a minimum, as we don't want to make any sweeping generalizations about the performance of 1P Opteron workstations or Athlon 64 until we're given the appropriate platforms to make final judgments upon. However, what we did want to do was the following:

- Compare the Opteron to the Athlon XP on a clock for clock basis,
- Compare the Opteron to the fastest desktop Pentium 4, and
- Compare the Opteron to the fastest desktop Athlon XP

The first bullet is the most critical one to establish; we can compare the Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) to an Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) and get a good idea of how much of a benefit we get from the architectural improvements to the core and the on-die memory controller, but how are we to know whether the performance increase is coming from the Opteron architecture or the larger L2 cache?

In order to determine what applications are simply benefiting from a larger cache, we threw in a hypothetical 1.80GHz Barton processor into the mix. You'll remember from our Athlon XP 3000+ Review that the Barton core simply adds another 256KB to the Athlon XP's L2 cache, the perfect candidate for determining whether benchmarks are cache sensitive from the Athlon's perspective.

With all of that said, let's get to the test configuration:

If you're looking for synthetic benchmarks that deal with the performance of the L1/L2 caches and the on-die memory controller of the Opteron, be sure to read Part 1 of our coverage that details the architecture behind the processor as well as some low-level benchmarks of just those areas.