September 6th, 2007

Intel Tigerton and AMD Barcelona price list

Posted by George Ou @ 1:08 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers, Virtualization

Tags: Performance, Quad-core, AMD Opteron, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp., George Ou

Intel has launched the Xeon 7300 platform codenamed “Caneland” and the Core micro-architecture Xeon MP Processor codenamed “Tigerton”.  Since AMD is set to launch “Barcelona” quad-core Opterons next week and DailyTech leaked the Barcelona price list, we can now compare the prices for the new MP (multi-processor platform) CPUs.

*Note that all the unit prices listed below are for quantities of 1000
** IBM X3950 M2 X4 chipset (DDR2-based)
*** Unisys 32-socket chipset

The following AMD Barcelona prices were leaked by DailyTech

Barcelona performance numbers (other than AMD estimated SPEC CPU 2006 PEAK floating point score of 69.5 for two AMD 2350 processors) have not been announced yet so we can’t compare the price/performance yet.  If I were to make an *educated guess* for SPEC CPU 2006 integer performance, I would expect the top-end AMD Opteron 8350 to be close (faster or slower) to Intel’s slightly more expensive E7320 on performance.  The Opteron 8350 will win on energy efficiency because of Intel’s FBDIMM memory unless we’re talking about a system based on IBM’s X4 DDR2 chipset.

[update 5:07PM - I should clarify this "win" I'm granting AMD on energy efficiency against is at the low-end.  When you get to Intel's 80W E7340 2.4 GHz 8MB Cache model, you get a lot more work done which offsets the small power differential which changes the performance/watt metric significantly.  [UPDATE 9/8/2007 - Furthermore, Sun's engineer explained that the Barcelona processors only support 4 DDR2-667 memory DIMMs because that's a limit of DDR2 technology UNLESS you're willing to drop down to DDR2-533 memory which Sun is not willing to do.  This is why Sun's next 4-socket Intel server will have double the memory capacity of Sun's 4-socket AMD server so it isn't a black and white argument on DDR2 versus FBDIMM. This information I got isn't correct.  Each Opteron chip has two channels which means any 4-socket Opteron server will natively support 32 DDR2-533 or 667 DIMMs.  I could have sworn 2-socket servers had 16 DIMM slots which they do so I thought the info I got from the Sun engineer sounded funny at the time but I figured he would know better.]  IBM went to a very expensive and exotic design with their X4 chipset to be able to utilize DDR2 at high capacities.

We also need to recognize the fact that the 4-socket market cares about performance and memory capacity first and foremost.  Customers of 4-socket servers are willing to pay 4x the money for 2x the performance.  Someone willing to pay a $10K to $20K premium up-front for just a little more performance isn’t that worried about saving $100-$200 on power per year.]

We will not know exact performance numbers for Barcelona Opteron quad-core until hopefully next week.  Of course when they do release performance numbers, I’ll do a detailed price, watt, and performance shootout.  AMD by all estimates will dominate memory-intensive HPC (High Performance Computing) but they will not likely threaten anything above the Intel E7320 on mainstream server performance until AMD can ramp the clock frequencies on Barcelona.

If you also want to see leaked prices for Barcelona dual-socket processors, see this post.