[Beowulf] power usage, Intel 5160 vs. AMD 2216

Peter Kjellstrom cap at nsc.liu.se
Thu Jul 12 13:05:42 PDT 2007


On Wednesday 11 July 2007, Jon Bernard wrote:
> Two vendors recently bid on a cluster we're buying, and we've got
> questions about their power estimates that I though I'd also put to the
> list while we wait for the vendors to respond.
>
> Vendor A estimates that at peak load a compute node with two AMD 2216s,
> 4 GB of 667 DDR2 RAM, a hard drive, and an IB board will draw 265 watts.
> Vendor B estimates that such a node will draw 450 watts.
>
> Vendor B also estimates that a similar machine with two Intel 5160s will
> draw 550 watts at peak load.
>
> Anybody have any actual measurements?

For our latest big procurement I measured (among other things) the actual 
power draw of all final candidates. One was a dual Opteron 2220 (2.8 GHz dual 
core part) which at idle/load scored 218W/301W this with 12 dims (24 gig) one 
sata drive and no IB.

A 2nd vendor measured 230/315 for a very similar configuration.

We did not test any intel 51xx, only 53xx (quad core). The 2.33 GHz 53xx (80W 
tdp if I remember correctly) did around 260W/350W (this with one drive and 8 
fbdimms with a total of 32 gig).

An IB board is typically <10W, Mellanox says that their LX single port DDR 
card is only 4W.

Hope that helps a bit,
 Peter

> Jon
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