AMD Opteron "Piledriver" Processors Arrive Mid-November

[nt300]

The 10-core and 8-core Xeons that have been out for some time will most likely blow these Opterons out of the water in most applications, the only saving grace being that Opterons are way cheaper.

In the end the price talks. You can prob buy tripple the amount of cores vs. the price of Xeons with less cores. Which would you buy
AMD has winner here.

 

[eidairaman1]

In the end the price talks. You can prob buy tripple the amount of cores vs. the price of Xeons with less cores. Which would you buy
AMD has winner here.

good example i believe would be this for its time

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

 

[nt300]

good example i believe would be this for its time

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer
Wow, PS3's.

 

[blibba]

In the end the price talks. You can prob buy tripple the amount of cores vs. the price of Xeons with less cores. Which would you buy
AMD has winner here.

I refer you to Aquinus's excellent post above.

 

[Fourstaff]

Actually, one Intel HT core > one AMD module in most multithreaded workloads.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/287?vs=434

See also FX41** vs. i3, etc.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/2

So I expect these Xeons to perform around the level of existing SB 8-cores.

Yes of course there is the matter of clockspeed and different workloads, so I will have to give credit to Intel for pulling ahead in various tasks.

In the end the price talks. You can prob buy tripple the amount of cores vs. the price of Xeons with less cores. Which would you buy
AMD has winner here.

Situational winner, not outright winner. You have not factored in other costs, like boards, support, software, etc. Cores are almost dirt cheap in the grand scheme.

 

[eidairaman1]

US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer
Wow, PS3's.

ya thank you R&D lmao

 

[3870x2]

I am an IT analyst for a company, and it comes down to how you use your cores.

Our choice was Intel because of the power of the cores. If you were an IT Analyst, you would know that the majority of purchasing is moving towards number of cores. Using Intel can save us thousands of dollars because we achieve the same performance with less cores.


If you were one of the people factoring in the cost of the CPU, you are not an IT professional (or atleast not for a very large company.) Xeon processor? $500. SQL Licensing? $20,000 for the Xeon cores. We put the cost of the processors in the same category as screws, mounts, and other small-cost objects.

 

[Disparia]

Glad you're not here... would have me developing on weak $500 Xeons.

 

[3870x2]

Glad you're not here... would have me developing on weak $500 Xeons.

We arent looking for enthusiast xeons when we are a business. That is a good idea of how a business fails.

Even so, $2,000 is small.

Now that I think about it, we did upgrade the e5s, so $900 is probably more accurate. We spent over $100,000 on software since the beginning of the summer. We are not a large company, probably comprised of less than 400 individuals altogether.

 

[Disparia]

Pffttt.... tell ya what. I'll make it work with Standard instead of Enterprise. Or even better, I'll make it work with SQL Express. Put most of that money into my hardware and skim a little off the top for yourself. That way I'll have more than enough resources to run a cloud service on the side in addition to the company project.

 

[Dent1]

Actually, one Intel HT core > one AMD module in most multithreaded workloads.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/287?vs=434

See also FX41** vs. i3, etc.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/2

So I expect these Xeons to perform around the level of existing SB 8-cores.

Things have changed. The Trinity APU based on Piledriver (4 core) is as fast as the 2 core i3 and significantly faster in multi threaded apps.

www.bit-tech.net/

the A10-5800K has a clear lead at stock speed. For example it was noticeably faster in the image editing and video encoding tests, beating the Core i3-2100 in the latter, while coming close in the multi-tasking test too, where it was miles ahead of the A8-3870K.

Trinty can still struggle in our image editing benchmark, although it finally holds its own when it comes to our video editing and multi-tasking tests, which is very encouraging

www.TomsHardware.com

A majority of our threaded tests—particularly the ones that emphasize integer-heavy code—go in AMD’s favor. It’ll take more than a dual-core 3.1 GHz chip to get Intel ahead in those benchmarks.

 

[cdawall]

The 10-core and 8-core Xeons that have been out for some time will most likely blow these Opterons out of the water in most applications, the only saving grace being that Opterons are way cheaper.

They don't. There is a reason a lot of companies are moving towards AMD based chips for servers for one they can take the old Phenom II based G34 chips toss them in the bin update the BIOS on there high end 4P server board and drop in 4 16 core chips that quadruples the number of threads. On top of that using the proper version of Linux with AMD compilers they obliterate Intel server chips in multithreaded apps. Why do you think so many people are running them in WCG? You can get eBay Intel chips quite cheap as well...

 

[3870x2]

Pffttt.... tell ya what. I'll make it work with Standard instead of Enterprise. Or even better, I'll make it work with SQL Express. Put most of that money into my hardware and skim a little off the top for yourself. That way I'll have more than enough resources to run a cloud service on the side in addition to the company project.

We use standard, but we have multiple applications.

Our software vendors do not support anything but MSSQL standard. These aren't little toys we are playing with in our spare time, this is tens of millions of dollars a year. I could make it work with SQL express, but it would be my ass and several hundred jobs were it to fail.

 

[Disparia]

Fine, I'll find some other analyst to join in on my illegitimate endeavors

On a serious note, oh I'm aware. Back when I did eComm IT grossed $15M/yr for the company. Struck a good balance between DIY and 3rd party so there was always enough leftover in the budget for toys.

 

[suraswami]

the OP shows 16MB L3 cache, is it really L3 or all put together?

hmm AM3+ also gets 16MB L3 cache (hopefully).

 

[Jstn7477]

the OP shows 16MB L3 cache, is it really L3 or all put together?

hmm AM3+ also gets 16MB L3 cache (hopefully).

Each "8 core" Bulldozer/Piledriver die has 2MB L2 per module (8MB total) and 8MB L3 cache.

 

[3870x2]

Fine, I'll find some other analyst to join in on my illegitimate endeavors

On a serious note, oh I'm aware. Back when I did eComm IT grossed $15M/yr for the company. Struck a good balance between DIY and 3rd party so there was always enough leftover in the budget for toys.

Its funny because I had actually brought that up while we were talking (there are 3 of us in the department altogether). After a good laugh, we realized there was no reason we couldnt do this.

The biggest issue was that if it wasnt officially supported by our software vendor, then we wouldnt get any support if things went to hell with their software.

 

[nt300]

Thank you AMD

Without the competition, a pure Intel monopoly would have left the workstation and server computing world years behind what it is today. By Bruce Gain, PCWorld

 

[BUCK NASTY]

what could i do with a 16 core processor?

Throw 4 of them into a 4p rig and rule the world of F@H.

 

[Norton]

Throw 4 of them into a 4p rig and rule the world of F@H.

Don't you mean throw 8 of them in 2x 4P rigs and rule the world twice

 

[Aquinus]

In server applications, like a website that has a couple hundred users on at once, will show you where multi-processor setups come in handy. Then you can do cool things like move your database to another server and keep the application on your old server. So now you spread your resources over 2 servers. There are tools that let you take this much further. For example, if you have ever used PostgreSQL, there is a database layer called pgpool2 (I think that is the name,) and it lets you do multi-master database replication as well as load balancing. So you get performance, redundancy, and scalability across multiple servers for your database. Granted these aren't consumer tools. These are things that developers build, use, and share because we're the only people who need to use it. Not to mention that any server with more than 1 processor is most likely going to be given a variety of tasks by a potentially large pool of users, unless you're like BN who folds all day long.

 

[eidairaman1]

You can get eBay Intel chips quite cheap as well...

Im not so trusting of Fleabay for CPUs, ive had 1 out of 4 be good actually and the other 3 DOA.

 

[blibba]

= bang for buck

btw TDP is measured differently between both companies so it still is a moot point, there is no standard of measuring it

/thread

I hadn't realised the full extent of this.

Check out 95W vs. 95W: