[Beowulf] Benchmark between Dell Poweredge 1950 And 1435

[Mark Hahn]

>> Poweredge 1435SC
>> Dual Core AMD Opteron 2216 2.4GHz
>> 3GB RAM 667MHz, 2x512MB and 2x1GB Single Ranked DIMMs
>> 
>> Poweredge 1950
>> Dual Core Intel Xeon  5130 2.0Ghz
>> 2GB 533MHz (4x512MB), Single Ranked DIMMs

in general, the opteron will probably have an advantage for memory-intensive
codes; the core2 starts out with larger per-core cache and double the fp-SSE 
throughput, so will probably win for cache-friendly, SSE-able FP-intense codes.

as usual, AMD and Intel are out-of-phase in product generations,
so this is basically a semi-old AMD chip versus an Intel chip designed 
specifically to beat the AMD chip ;)

> Here are some benchmarks I did on similar (though non-Dell) systems:
>
> http://www.duke.edu/~jlb17/optxeon.pdf

with wild handwaves, I think this data supports my generalizations:
the core2 is an excellent chip which starts out faster, but tends not
to scale as well as memory load or nthreads increases.  that's what 
you'd expect from the generational difference, larger cache, poorer 
memory infrastructure.

regards, mark hahn.