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The Reality

  John Fruehe        2011-11-15 08:33:58       2,176        0    

Everyone loves to talk about benchmarks. AMD’s Andy Parma recently wrote a blog that covers the top performance scores for the AMD Opteronâ„¢ 6200 Series processors. As marketing professionals, of course that’s what we talk about. What’s important to look at is the reality as well – what customers are actually purchasing. When you drive past car dealership, you’ll always see the fancy red sports car prominently displayed. It draws people in – it’s what the car dealers purposely put there for you to view and think about. But what vehicle do people drive out of the dealership parking lot with? Well, even in a tech-savvy city like Austin, I see a lot more Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys on the road than bright red sports cars. Why? While the Porsche is a faster car, the reality that we all face is that most people want to get the most for their money. If you take a look, server buyers are no different.

If you look at the past three quarters, the most popular Intel Xeon processor is the E5640, according to Mercury Research[1]. That is the N-7 part (7 bins down from top speed). Clearly raw performance is not the #1 driver and influence for server purchases. Perhaps people are more focused on maximizing their budget?

As a matter of fact, almost 70 percent of their shipments are the lowest speed bins, but that is a discussion for another day.

The real discussion for today’s blog post is what you actually get for your money. If the E5640 priced at $774 is the most popular processor for Intel, let’s look at what AMD has in that price range. The AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6276 is priced at $788. This 2.3GHz powerhouse has 16 cores and four memory channels. I would categorize this processor in the “same price range” as the Intel Xeon E5640.

While the AMD Opteron processor Model 6276 and the Intel Xeon E5640 processor are in the same price range, the performance is anything but similar:

While the price of these two processors is only a $14 different, the performance for the AMD Opteron processor Model 6276 is actually 89 percent higher[2].  And to be fair, we chose SPECint®_rate, an integer benchmark[3]. I could have picked several other benchmarks where we lead by even more (for example, the SPEC_FP where AMD has a 90 percent lead) but I specifically chose integer, which covers the widest range of applications.

For the benchmark that represents the widest range of applications, compared to the most popular Intel processor, we have a dollar-for-dollar 89 percent lead in performance.

That is the reality of value in the data center today.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server and Embedded products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.


[1] Source: Mercury Research, PC Processors and Chip Sets, Updated Edition 3Q2011

[2] Pricing based on current Intel pricing http://ark.intel.com/products/47923/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5640-(12M-Cache-2_66-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI) and AMD pricing: http://www.amd.com/us/products/pricing/Pages/server-opteron.aspx

[3] SPECint®_rate2006 Score= 480, 2 x AMD Opteronâ„¢ processors Model 6276 in Supermicro A+ Server 1022-URF server, 128GB (16 x 8GB DDR3-1333) memory, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, x86 Open64 4.2.5.2 Compiler Suite, based on AMD internal testing in Oct’11.  http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q4/cpu2006-20111020-18698.html

SPECint®_rate2006 Score = 253, 2 x Intel Xeon processors Model X5640 in  Cisco UCS C210 M2 , 48GB (12 x 4GB DDR3-1333) memory, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1, Intel C++ Compiler XE Version 12.0.1.116 Build 20101116, published  Mar’11 at http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q2/cpu2006-20110329-15460.html

Source:http://blogs.amd.com/work/2011/11/14/the-reality/

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