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August 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Power-efficiency test reveals respective strengths of AMD and Intel
In its latest round of power-efficiency tests pitting the AMD Opteron against the Intel Xeon, independent consulting firm Neal Nelson and Associates found that AMD's offering outperformed Intel's in 36 of 57 cases.
The results are by no means cut and dry. While the AMD appears to once again have an edge in terms of raw power effienecy, factors such as memory size, transaction type, and transcation loads made for notable and interesting differentiators.
Nelson performed this gauntlet of tests on servers -- one equipped with the Opteron 2222 and the other with the Xeon (Woodcrest) 5160 -- configured with two, four, six, and eight gigabytes of main memory at various transaction-processing load levels.
Overall, Nelson found that for certain configurations and at certain load levels, the Intel Xeon based server was 2.4 to 11.7 percent more power efficient while in other cases the AMD Opteron based server was 9.2 to 23.1 percent more power efficient.
Memory once again proved an important variable. In general, larger main memory sizes resulted in higher transaction throughput and higher power efficiency. Further, in cases where Intel outperformed AMD in power efficiency, the servers were configured with smaller larger memory sizes. "There was a visible trend that as the memory size increased that there was an increasing shift of power-efficiency toward the Opteron," Nelson notes the white paper outlining his testing.
Importantly, Nelson discovered differences in power-performance depending on what type of work the servers were doing. At the maximum throughput, based on transactions per watt hour, the Intel system delivered better power-efficiency by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent.
In addition, when the systems were idle and waiting for transactions to process, the AMD server was 30.4 to 53.1 percent more power efficient.
He put the machines through two different tests. One employed the Neal Nelson Transaction Benchmark, in which simulated Web clients present transaction requests to the server. As soon as the server responds to a request, the client submits a new request.
In the second test, employing the Neal Nelson Power-Efficiency Benchmark, he presented the servers with a set number of transactions, then measured the power expended for each transaction arrival rate.
For the loads, he simulated over-the-Web credit card transactions on the servers from RTE (Remote Terminal Emulator) nodes to the machines, which were running Apache2.
You can read the white paper outlining the testing and results here on the Neal Nelson and Associates Web site.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 30, 2007 05:24 PM
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Is anybody aware of any other published data for server power efficiency? If so, is it for complete machines including motherboard, ram, etc.? Does it support or contradict the findings in this study?
Posted by: Neal Nelson at August 31, 2007 03:04 PMReally this is just another attempt by AMD to show that they are good for something other than speed. Which of course most people are concern about.. speed speed speed.
Posted by: Vincent at August 31, 2007 11:20 PMThanks for the comment, Vincent, but I have to disagree on a couple of points.
First, this isn't a test by AMD. Neal Nelson and Associates is an independent and reputable consulting firm.
Second, companies are not just concerned about speed, speed, speed. There are companies out there being crippled by energy bills, cooling bills, and an inability to expand their datacenters because they can't get the power they need from their local utility. That's why so many companies, including Intel, AMD, IBM, Microsoft, HP, and plenty more have formed The Green Grid.
Moreover, the government has taken a keen interest in datacenter power consumption. The EPA recently released an expansive report on the subject for Congress.
Posted by: Ted Samson at September 3, 2007 02:08 AMVincent, This is not an attempt by AMD to show anything. It is an attempt by me to show that: 1) It is possible to measure and compare server power efficiency, and 2) In some situations Intel is better and in others AMD is better. Neither Intel nor AMD had any financial or engineering input into this test. In the white paper we do report speed as maximum throughput on page 11. It shows that for cached disk I/O the Xeon is better but when physical disk I/O dominates the Opteron is better.
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