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

[Bill Broadley]

Sangamesh B wrote:
> Hi Tim,
> 
>      Recently I benchmarked a Fortran based Scientific application on both
> Intel Xeon Quad core and AMD Opteron Quad core with RHEL 5. Following are
> the results:
> 
>                                                AMD-2.3GHz
>          INTEL-2.33GHz
> 
> 1. Serial                                   147.719
> sec                                73.952 sec
> 
> 2. Parallel 4 core                        39.798
> sec                                32.317 sec
> 
> 3. Parallel 8 core                        26.880
> sec                                30.371 sec

Heh, so despite a slower compiler the better scalability of the opteron leads 
to a faster time with 8 cores.  For a fairer test I'd suggest using the same 
compiler on both.

>       For AMD, I used GCC compiler(gfortran), which is released by AMD for
> its barcelona-AMD fam10 based processors.

Gfortran is definitely getting better, I'd still expect intel's compiler to 
have a significant advantage in most cases.