Sun Opteron x4100 outscaling woodcrest (and outperforming = side benefit)
Wednesday Nov 15, 2006
Woodcrest scaling issues? Yes, remember scaling is critical for system performance, so don't look too much at single core performance or single job performance as it can lead to the wrong conclusions. In fact Sun's Opteron scaling means that the Sun systems can outperform Woodcrest by 18% to 22% as shown below.
On a 4 core/2chip Intel Woodcrest systems they are only seeing 2.8x to 2.9x on 4 cores -- this doesn't bode well for quad-core or larger systems made out of these. Sun sees 3.6x to 4.1x scaling in the table below. Couple this with the high-wattage of these Woodcrest (31-Oct posting) and Woodcrest may have issues?
Opteron leads poor Woodcrest scaling & performance on Fluent 6 Benchmark (Both systems 2 sockets and using dual-core)
| System | GHz/Chip | #cores | FL5M3 (scaling) | FL5L2 (scaling) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| INTEL S5000XAL | 3.0GHz Xeon Woodcrest 5160 | 4-core | 827.0 (2.8x) | 400.0 (2.9x) |
| INTEL S5000XAL | 3.0GHz Xeon Woodcrest 5160 | 2-core | 553.7 (1.9x) | 226.0 (1.6x) |
| INTEL S5000XAL | 3.0GHz Xeon Woodcrest 5160 | 1-core | 297.3 (1.0x) | 138.0 (1.0x) |
| Sun | ||||
| Sun X4100 M2 | 2.8GHz Opteron DC 2200 | 4-core | 979.9 (3.6x) | 486.6 (4.1x) |
| Sun X4100 M2 | 2.8GHz Opteron DC 2200 | 2-core | 516.1 (1.9x) | 241.8 (2.1x) |
| Sun X4100 M2 | 2.8GHz Opteron DC 2200 | 1-core | 273.5 (1.0x) | 117.6 (1.0x) |
Rating = No. of sequential runs of test case possible in 1 day, 86,400/(Total Elapsed Run Time in Seconds)
Fluent results at: http://www.fluent.com/software/fluent/fl5bench/flbench_6.2/fullres.htm
...I suspect even better performance and scaling on Sun Fire X4100 M2 with Solaris...
