[Beowulf] Q: AMD Opteron (Barcelona) 2356 vs Intel Xeon 5460

[Carsten Aulbert]

Hi Tim,

Tim Chipman wrote:
> Does anyone have any 'real world' experience with 'both' of these CPUs, in terms of relative performance for 'whatever work you do' ?
> 
> I realize the xeon is a faster mhz part (3.16ghz xeon vs 2.3ghz opteron) so I'm more concerned with "relative performance per mhz"
> 
> I'm involved with a cluster project, and we have 2 options from our vendor,
> 
> - 25 compute nodes, dual-quadcore intel 5460, or
> - 32 compute nodes, dual-quadcore amd 2356
> 
>>From what I've been able to glean (Spec.org / SpecCPU 2006),
> 
> - the intel chips have better integer performance
> - the amd chips have better FPU performance
> 
> so the likely anticipated real-world performance result .. will depend on how a given application blends / balances things.

We have "only" the Quad-Xeon boxes with E5435 and these are quite fast,
indeed it seems that FFTW seems to run faster on Xeons but I have not
made any benchmarks for the past ~ 9 months, so I don't know about the
latest Opterons.

I think you need to come up with a real world scenario of what will be
run on the cluster and maybe compile a little benchmark yourself ans aks
the vendor to run both (or get hands on on both boxes. I think that's
the only "fair" comparison that's possible.

HTH

Carsten