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Intel chip power & details on Opteron vs. Woodcrest, etc

Friday Dec 08, 2006

Here is a processor wattage chart, but notice that Intel has the memory controller off chip so you need to add 30-35 watts to this figures (opteron includes this on chip) http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/xeon.htm

For more details on power budget breakdown I got pointed to these two pages for an AMD comparison (looks like it is part of a bigger preso?, no confidential statement): http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/opt_vs_wc_8_dimms.pps
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/4_opt_vs_4_pax.pps

[2] Comments

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Posted at 02:23PM Dec 08, 2006 in Wattage-Power
Tags: amd intel opteron woodcrest

Comments:

Do you notice on the Xeon 7000 series (NetBurst based, not Woodcrest based), the fastest part, 3.5 GHz 7150N, has a slower system bus (667 MHz) than the 3.4 GHz part? Increase the processor clock rate by 3%, but slow down the bus 16%. I bet the 3.5 GHz part is actually lower performing than the 3.4 GHz part.

The weak system bus is why Intel had to put a 16MB L3 cache on these chips.

And these Xeon 7000s are 150 watt blowtorches.

No wonder Intel's four-way strategy is to cram four Woodcrests into two sockets. Of course Intel has to slow down the processors to do this, and each pair of processors have to share a single connection to the system bus, so they effectively lose half of their bandwidth per processor.

Once you get above two-way systems, Intel can't compete with Opteron.

Posted by Mark on December 09, 2006 at 08:53 AM PST #

The real issue (at the moment and until presumably mid 2007) is that 2CPU Xeon E5345 has performance comparable (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) in many important apps to 4-CPU(!!!) dual-core Opteron server (which is bigger, more expensive and use more power even with 16 DIMMs). Look at TPC-C, TPC-H, SpecInt_rate etc. if you don't believe me. [Disclaimer] I was (and am) a big Opteron fan [/Disclaimer]

Posted by 208.252.3.62 on December 12, 2006 at 06:41 PM PST #