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details on power budgets: Opteron advantage over Woodcrest

Thursday Dec 07, 2006

More details on power budget differences that give Opteron at least a 34% lead over Woodcrest.

I gave some basics of this in this posting: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/design_strategies%3A_wattage_advantage_of

Woodcrest power budget: Dual-core Xeon's : 160 watts per socket (80w each) PLUS 44.8 watts for chipset (incl memory controllers) PLUS ~~66.4 watts~~ 166.4 watts FBDIMM (16 DIMMs).

{{typo corrected: yes FB-DIMMs suck an amazing 170 watts for 16 DIMMs -- that's nearly 100watts more than DDR2. That is why Intel-based systems only report wattage on small memory configs, but still use the same large memory configs for various benchmarks.}}

Opteron power budget: Dual-core Opteron's: 190 watts socket (95w max each) PLUS 16 watts for chipset PLUS 70.4 watts for DDR2 (16 DIMMs).

...and this is just looking at just the chips -- and not adding the typical controllers you'd have for a functioning system like disk , network, etc...

[3] Comments

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Posted at 03:16PM Dec 07, 2006 in Wattage-Power
Tags: fire opteron sun t2000 woodcrest

Comments:

You are loosin' it dude. The numbers you enumerate don't add up to any Opteron advantage. How did you come up with the 34% advantage? From your post Woodcrest adds up to 271.2W and Opteron adds up to 276.4W!

Posted by WontDiscloser on December 08, 2006 at 05:50 AM PST #

WHOA, my typo. I'll correct this FB-DIMMs suck an amazing 170 watts for 16 DIMMs -- yes that much more than DDR2. That is why Intel-based systems only report wattage on small memory configs, but still use the same large memory configs for various benchmarks. THANKS for noticing the typo!

Posted by BM Seer on December 08, 2006 at 10:54 AM PST #

And of course, it helps that Opteron is 36% faster on SPEC 2000 fprate and 9-16% faster on SPEC 2000fp.
Plus, the 5160 scales pretty poorly with clock (2GHz vs. 3GHz comparisons). With 50% increase in clock, SPEC FPrate goes up only about 28%. Thats bound to hurt!

Posted by 192.18.43.225 on December 08, 2006 at 01:42 PM PST #