New 3.0 Harpertown vs. 2.0 Barcelona benches

[Silent.Sin]

Anandtech does a battle royale of quad cores. From the looks of it the Barcelona is coming out looking quite competitive with the Clovertown in the performance/watt realm and even a few transaction benches, especially given the huge clockspeed disadvantage. That FB-DIMM move really bit Intel in the ass, wonder why they didn't learn with RAMBUS in the P4 days to not use some exotic proprietary memory solution. Looks like Harpertown will up the ante quite a bit tho even with the FB-DIMMs bringing it down slightly. AMD's only option is to get those clockspeeds up.

Now whatever happened to that 2.5GHz Barcelona sample Anand was given for the initial reviews? I guess maybe they only got one and couldn't do a 2S comparison but I'd be very interested to know how this thing scales. Even a 1S comparison would be insightful.

 

[pxc]

The Tech Report has another review with 11 different apps benchmarked: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13224

Unfortunately, except in niche settings, people buy performance, not performance per Watt.

 

[Azhar]

Normally, this is true, but those are server processors. IT department tends to think more thoroughly than just pick something because of speed.

If speed difference are barely noticable in real-world implementation, I'd definitely go for lower power requirement.

 

[nonameo]

The Tech Report has another review with 11 different apps benchmarked: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13224

Unfortunately, except in niche settings, people buy performance, not performance per Watt.

I agree, but the real question is who will win in performance per dollar.

 

[pxc]

I agree, but the real question is who will win in performance per dollar.

That's an even better point, and as we've seen from the reviews it varies depending on the type of workload.

It will be good for buyers while AMD and Intel decide to slash prices. Unfortunately, the processors that AMD is marketing as 70% faster than dual core Opterons are all priced at or below current dual core Opteron ASPs (2300/8300 vs 2200/8200). That won't help and what it's going to do to dual core ASPs is even worse.

Why do I mention that? Because as you can see below, Intel is willing to slash prices on cheaper to manufacture 45nm Xeons that are competitive with Barcelona Opterons in typical non-HPC workloads (i.e. 98% of the server market) up to what AMD is going to have this year. Will AMD be satisfied with sub-$400 2300 series Opterons? If not, the bang for the buck will probably be in Intel's favor for non-HPC servers.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_609,00.html?redir=CPPR01
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1031386239&postcount=5 (sorry, Intel locked the page with the prices, but I saw the list before it was locked and it matched what dailytech posted)