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January 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

AMD yields more efficiency, Intel more throughput in quad-core CPU showdown

AMD yields more efficiency, Intel more throughput in quad-core CPU showdown In a recent gauntlet of tests comparing AMD's quad-core Opteron processor (Barcelona) to Intel's quad-core Xeon (a.k.a. Tigerton), the Xeon delivered up to 14 percent more throughput, but the Opteron used up to 41 percent less energy.

The series of tests were conducted by Neal Nelson and Associates, an independent consulting firm. If you've been following my blog for a while, that name may sound familiar: Nelson has run similar power and performance tests over the past year, one in July and one in August.

Nelson conducted this series of tests using similarly configured quad-core Xeon and Opteron servers using 1GB memory modules at 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB main memory sizes. He also used one- and two-socket configurations at speeds of both 2.0GHz and 2.33GHz.

Cutting to the chase, Nelson determined the following in his tests:

-- When the sizes of the database working sets were small enough to fit in the servers’ kernel disk buffer cache, such that there was virtually no physical disk I/O, the Xeon-based servers delivered up to 14 percent higher throughput than the Opteron-based servers.

-- When the sizes of the database working sets were too large to fit in the kernel disk buffer cache, which forced substantial physical disk I/O, the Xeon-based servers delivered up to 3 percent higher throughput than the Opteron-based servers

-- When the servers were subjected to various identical levels of transaction arrival rates, the Opteron-based servers consumed up to 32 percent less power than the Xeon-based servers.

-- When the systems were idle and waiting for transactions to process, the Opteron-based servers consumed up to 41 percent less power than the Xeon-based servers. ("The power consumption at idle is particularly significant since studies have shown that many servers are powered on, but idle, 80 percent of the time," Nelson notes.)

"By themselves, the Intel processor chips may use less power, but all current Intel Xeon servers require the use of fully-buffered memory modules [FB-DIMM]. These FB-memory modules appear to consume more power than the DDR-II memory modules used by the AMD-based servers. The result is that in many cases an Opteron-based server actually uses less total power than a Xeon-based server," says Nelson in a written statement.

A better green benchmark?
Nelson reached his conclusions by employing what's he's dubbed Neal Nelson's Power Efficiency Benchmark. The benchmark works as follows: Nelson simulates users from 32 separate computers submitting individual transactions to similarly configured servers running Apache2 Web server, the MySQL relational database, and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server O. He measures the throughput and power usage of the systems in increments of 50 users, from 100 to 500, over half-hour sessions. "The benchmark has a complex multi-user load with a large memory footprint, a high volume of context switches, significant network traffic, and substantial amounts of physical disk I/O," according to Nelson.

In addition to sharing his conclusions for his test, Nelson has made an effort to differentiate his power-efficiency benchmark from the one recently unveiled by SPEC. "The SPECPower test has a single-client machine feeding batches of 1,000 transactions to a small number of Java-based application programs," says Nelson. "[It also] has a small memory footprint, a low volume of context switches, simple network traffic, and it performs no physical disk I/O. The SPEC test was created by a committee of computer vendor employees, and SPEC offers no guarantee that their numbers will correlate to a customer's real-world experiences."

Nelson's test results can be viewed in their entirety on his Web site.

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.

Posted by Ted Samson on January 16, 2008 11:50 AM

January 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

CES: HP pledges to cut PC power usage by 25 percent

Using the greener-than-ever CES as a backdrop, HP this week announced plans to reduce the energy consumption of its volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent by 2010 -- relative to its 2005 numbers.

HP's strategy for achieving this goal is pretty straightforward. In part, the company will continue to integrate more efficient power supplies and lower-energy chip sets into its systems. Here, HP is safely betting on the fact that these component vendors down the supply chain will continue to crank out increasingly efficient wares.

Power to the PC
HP's approach to power supplies is worth noting; I find it quite interesting, given the green agenda the company has embraced. In 2007, HP rolled out smaller form factors for its USDTs (ultra slim desktops). The HP dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC, for example, is 46 percent smaller than previous models.

As part of the new design, the company incorporated a standard 85 percent efficient external power supply, according to Andrew Medlin, senior manager of business PC product marketing at HP. (External power supplies tend to be more efficient than internal, Medin points out.)

That's fine for small systems. Large-chassis systems, however, run on internal power supplies. HP customers seeking to purchase a larger system with a relatively more efficient 80-plus percent internal power supply will need to pay a $20 premium.

In other words, HP isn't making the more efficient supply the standard here. "There is significant cost associated with more efficient power supplies in general, and since not all customers value the more efficient power supplies, we chose to provide them a choice," says Medin.

Of course, I'd love to see HP and other PC vendors pushing green agendas to make efficient power supplies the standard on all of their machines. Yes, I can appreciate that the cold, hard reality of the bottom line can offset the greenest of intentions, a fact that many a vendor is dealing with. Even pushing the efficient power supply at a discount (say, $10 a piece) and highlighting the green and cost-saving benefits would be a good start.

Resting easy
In addition to using efficient components to achieve its goal, HP says it will employ more energy-saving technologies and processes into its volume PC portfolio. As an example, the company pointed out that Verdiem's Surveyor remote power management software agent comes preloaded on all its dc7800-series PCs. "When activated, Surveyor can help measure, manage, and reduce power consumption on PCs and monitors by up to 33 percent, or about 200 kilowatt-hours per PC annually," according to HP.

Indeed, there are cost savings and other green-related benefits to be enjoyed through PC power-management tools. But, as with an 80-plus percent efficient power supply that comes at a premium, the Surveyor tool isn't free; it's costs around $20 per licensee to activate.

Here, I'm less critical of HP's choice. Verdiem's offering is geared toward managing power consumption of PCs throughout a larger organization and is far more powerful than the run-of-the-mill tools that put the average home PC in sleep mode when it's not in use. Tools from Verdiem and its competitors are designed for remotely managing a fleet of PCs, ensuring they're powered down when not in use and turned on just before end-users come to their desks in the morning. Many of these power-management solutions are also designed to wake up systems from sleep mode after hours for patches and backups, then put them back to sleep. Given the power and complexity of these types of tools, it's only fair that HP pass the cost to large-size customers.

HP's Medin does add that HP is working on a power-management tool aimed at small businesses and SOHO customers that "will eventually be available at no added cost."

The bottom line here, as I see it, is that HP's on the right track in pursuing its green agenda. In fact, given all the increasingly efficient components and energy management software we're seeing, I don't expect it will be too difficult for the company to attain its goal of cutting energy usage of its volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent by 2010.

I am, however, interested to see how HP and its competitors will continue to raise the green bar. Will we, in fact, see a company commit to making the most energy-efficient power supplies out there the standard in their systems? Will more PCs come preloaded with better power-management tools? I certainly expect so.

How do you envision PC vendors making their wares greener?

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.

Posted by Ted Samson on January 10, 2008 12:58 PM

November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Emerson delivers free Energy Logic blueprint for building a power-efficient datacenter

the path to green efficiency How-to guides are downright handy for tackling daunting projects, such as deploying a new BPM (business process management) solution or building a birdhouse (one of those really fancy ones with indoor plumbing).

One of the most daunting tasks that companies face today is figuring out how to wring greater energy efficiency out of their datacenters. Certainly, many vendors are ready to step up and demonstrate where their respective products fit into the power-saving puzzle. But there's something to be said for a vendor-neutral blueprint to plan the overall task.

That all is a wordy lead-in to pointing you to a new report -- available as a free download -- released today by Emerson Network Power. It's titled "Energy Logic: Reducing Data Center Energy Consumption by Creating Savings that Cascade Across Systems," and it's an impressive piece of work, outlining ten interrelated technology strategies that comprise a holistic approach to improving datacenter energy efficiency by as much as 50 percent, according to the company. And as I noted, it's free.

For a little background, Emerson has coined the term "Energy Logic" in this report, a strategy which, according to the company, "centers on 'the cascade effect' by which one watt saved at the processor level can save an average total of 2.84 watts in energy consumption."

The report starts at the server component level, outlining the benefits of low-power processors. "Independent research studies show these lower-power processors deliver the same performance as higher power models," the report says. "In the 5,000-square-foot datacenter modeled for this paper, low-power processors create a 10 percent reduction in overall datacenter power consumption."

Next up: power supplies. The report notes that most power supplies found in servers are working at around 72 percent effiency -- yet "best-in-class power supplies are available today that deliver efficiency of 90 percent. Use of these power supplies reduces power draw within the data center by 124 kW or 11 percent of the 1127 kW total," the report says.

From there, the report suggests that datacenter operators look at power-management software. Despite the fact that processors have built-in power-management features, they end up disabled for fear of crippling response time. Yet "in idle mode, most servers consume between 70 and 85 percent of full operational power."

The Emerson Energy Logic report suggests that admins reconsider how they use power-management features. In the 5,000 square foot datacenter model, the report says that using power-management features can reduce peak power draw from 80 percent to 45 percent, saving "an additional 86 kW or eight percent of the unoptimized datacenter load."

Blade servers have a role to play in the energy-efficient datacenter, according to the Emerson report. "Blade servers consume about 10 percent less power than equivalent rack-mount servers because multiple servers share common power supplies, cooling fans and other components. ... More importantly, blades facilitate the move to a high-density data center architecture, which can significantly reduce energy consumption."

Moving on, Emerson's Energy Logic strategy highlights server virtualization. In the 5,000 square foot model, "assuming 25 percent of servers are virtualized with eight non-virtualized physical servers being replaced by one virtualized physical server, ... virtualization provides an incremental eight percent reduction in total datacenter power," according to the report.

No. 6 on Emerson's energy-efficiency menu for datacenters: best cooling practices. That includes "sealing gaps in floors, using blanking panels in open spaces in racks, and avoiding mixing of hot and cold air." This is low-hanging fruit that requires no additional technology investment but can result in a five percent efficiency boost, based, again, on the 5,000 square foot datacenter model.

415V AC power distribution is the next strategy component in Emerson's Energy Logic scheme. The short of it is, most UPS systems are rather inefficient, as they convert incoming power to DC and then back to AC within the UPS. "In most datacenters, the UPS provides power at 480V, which is then stepped down via a transformer, with accompanying losses, to 208V in the power distribution system," according to the report. "These stepdown losses can be eliminated by converting UPS output power to 415V." The result: "an incremental two percent reduction in facility energy use" in the 5,000 square foot model.

Cooling reappears in the report next, specifically variable capacity cooling. "Typically, CRAC [computer room air conditioners] fans run at a constant speed and deliver a constant volume of air flow. Converting these fans to variable frequency drive fans allows fan speed and power draw to be reduced as load decreases," the report says. Emerson specifically cites digital scroll compressors here, which "allow the capacity of room air conditioners to be matched exactly to room conditions without turning compressors on and off."

The payoff: "A 20 percent reduction in fan speed provides almost 50 percent savings in fan-power consumption."

Ninth in the Emerson Energy Logic lineup is, lo, another cooling strategy: high-density supplemental cooling. Datacenter operators are cramming more machines into their facility, and CRAC systems alone can't handle the extra heat. "Supplemental cooling units are mounted above or alongside equipment racks, and pull hot air directly from the hot aisle and deliver cold air to the cold aisle," the report explains. These units can reduce cooling costs by 30 percent, Emerson reports.

Last but not least, there's monitoring and optimization. With varying types of hardware spread out around the datacenter, cooling can prove inefficient. "Cooling control systems can monitor conditions across the datacenter and coordinate the activities of multiple units to prevent conflicts and increase teamwork," the report says. "In the model, an incremental saving of one percent is achieved as a result of system-level monitoring and control."

There's plenty more information to be gleaned from Emerson's 21-page Energy Logic report, along with helpful charts and diagrams to help datacenter operators as they venture toward a greener, more sustainable facility.

Did I mention the report is available as a free download? Get it right here.

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog, tracking trends toward greener, more energy-efficient IT. Subscribe to his free Green Tech newsletter here.

Posted by Ted Samson on November 29, 2007 10:02 AM

September 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

In the chip race, efficiency beats speed

Following is essentially the content of today's Green Tech Newsletter. I generally don't post the newsletter verbatim in my blog, but it seemed important enough in the context of my piece about Barcelona. The newsletter, by the way, is free. You can subscribe here.

AMD and Intel have been locked in fierce races for quite a while now, the latest being the race to first deliver a quad-core processor. Intel managed to win by a nose there, unleashing Tigerton a few days before AMD presented Barcelona.

But speed alone won't be the determining factor as to which of these two processors will reign in the datacenter. Driven by customer demand for more energy-efficient hardware, both companies are talking up the importance of a less-familiar metric called performance per watt (PPW). As Intel tells it, "performance per system watt is calculated by taking the performance score from a benchmark or application and dividing it by the average system power usage (AC power from the wall)."

At a press meeting with Randy Allen, VP in charge of AMD's server and workstation division, Allen confirmed that there's been a shift in what customers want from hardware. "The traditional buying criterion has been peak performance. People would buy at the highest peak performance they could or they would buy on performance per dollar. ... This emergence of performance per watt has been dramatic over the last two years."

The problem with PPW is it's difficult to measure. To draw on a familiar example, what's a better performer: a hybrid or a pickup? The hybrid will certainly deliver more miles to the gallon if you're using it to get around town for work or play, but if the task is hauling lumber or heavy equipment, you'll get better results with the truck. Then again, if speed truly is what you need, gas costs be darned, maybe that Porsche is right for you.

Back to servers, then, how does a datacenter operator go about assessing whether Machine A or Machine B will deliver better PPW for, say, the company's accounting application? In my interview with Bruce Shaw, director of server operations at AMD, he told me the best approach is to load up your app on your server, then measure it at the wall.

Sure, that's not as simple as being able to look at the vendor-provided figures and know for certain which machine is the best overall performer for your specific needs. Then again, the exercise is a valuable one, given that filling your racks with the machines that gives you the best PPW will save you money in the long run -- just like filling your corporate fleet with hybrid trucks just might make more sense economically and ecologically than a fleet of Segways.

Posted by Ted Samson on September 13, 2007 03:00 AM

September 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

AMD lays down a green chip in Barcelona

Company bets on extreme efficiency with Barcelona -- that's textbook green advancement

I've always wanted to visit Spain. Catedrales. Museos. Tapas. Siestas. What's not to like? But while I may not be running with the bulls anytime soon, I have enjoyed this week's tour of Barcelona, AMD's newly minted quad-core processor. While InfoWorld's tests of the chip's capabilities are still under way, this little piece of silicon has the potential to make the green-tech-conscious datacenter operator cheer, "Ole!"

For all the facts and features I've absorbed in my briefings about Barcelona -- including a video interview with the company's director of server operations Bruce Shaw -- one stands out most for me: The chip delivers more than twice the combined integer and floating-point performance of its two-core predecessor at the same thermal envelope, according to AMD's SPEC tests. That's to say, despite the power boost, it effectively uses the same amount of energy and produces the same amount of heat as a two-core. One of the ways AMD accomplishes this feat: The cores are capable of powering down, or off, when they're not being used.

That, to me, is a textbook example of a green technological advancement. It means AMD has minted a processor with significantly higher performance per watt than its predecessor, a metric that's becoming increasingly important to datacenter operators compared to just raw speed. It would be like a car company unveiling an engine with twice the horsepower but the same gas mileage.

But Barcelona's green promise doesn't end there: Consider, also, that AMD designs its chips such that you can easily swap out an old one -- in this case, a two-core Opteron -- pop in a new four-quad, tweak the BIOS, and poof, you've got an upgraded machine. Not only is that a significant time-saver for upgrading your machines, but it means you can essentially double the overall processing power of your server farm without having to recycle or dispose of a single piece of otherwise-useful hardware. Therein lies another ecofriendly boon.

Rounding out the array of Barcelona's green-tech benefits: It's primed for virtualization. According to Shaw, AMD worked closely with the major virtualization vendors, including Microsoft, VMWare, and Xen to hone and accelerate the quad-core's virtualization capabilities. For example, the chip has a new feature called Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which, according to AMD, transfers to the chip some of the virtualization functionality previous performed by the software. The payoff: AMD claims the chip can deliver 79 percent more virtual machines that can its fastest dual-core processor. (That's a very conservative estimate, Shaw notes.)

Now, if the numbers AMD is sharing are correct, there's cause indeed for excitement for datacenter operators who are feeling the pressure of limited datacenter space and high energy bills. When you combine the performance boost of the chip alone and add in the virtualization boost, you're looking at a ton of potential to get far more work out of your machines.

There's a lot more to Barcelona, and I suggest you not only watch my video interview with Shaw but also check out Tom Yager's analysis. He's been immersed in information about the chip for quite some time now, plus he's testing it to see if it's all that AMD claims. (He's also put together a comparison of Intel's and AMD's respective four-quad CPUs right here.)

AMD has suffered some financial difficulty recently, and some analysts suggest that Barcelona is coming to the table too late to give the chipmaker the boost it needs. From my green-tech perspective, though, AMD appears to have created a piece of silicon that is very, very well suited for a day and age in which companies are becoming highly conscientious of their power consumption and limited datacenter space (not to mention their carbon footprints). This is an important piece of green technology, one that certainly warrants at least a close look from the enterprise.

Posted by Ted Samson on September 13, 2007 03:00 AM

August 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

In AMD-Intel square-off, memory proves key

In a follow-up gauntlet of tests pitting Intel Xeon processors against AMD Opterons, independent research company Neal Nelson and Associates found the Opteron generally -- but not always -- delivers superior raw energy efficiency. Interestingly, server memory proved a key factor.

Nelson tested the Opteron against the Xeon last month and determined AMD to be, hands down, the more power-efficient chip. His tests and results sparked plenty of discussion, including in my blog, prompting him to perform follow-up tests.

The most significant difference between this and the previous test is that he used an Opteron 2222 CPU rather than the 8222. He stuck with the Xeon 5160. In his tests, he once again compared the energy efficiency of a couple of similarly equipped servers, both configured with 4GB and 8GB of memory, as they processed Web transactions at a variety of load levels.

When machines were configured with 4GB of main memory, the Intel Xeon-based server proved between 1.4 and 5.1 percent more efficient. However, at 8GB, the Opteron server was between 6.1 and 12.7 percent more power efficient.

"It appears that when Intel chips are installed in Intel motherboards and sold as Intel servers, the Intel claim of superior power efficiency is not supported by the empirical data," said Nelson in a written statement.

Notably, the AMD server equipped with 4GB of memory proved 33.3 percent more power-efficient in idle than the Intel; with 8GB, it was 43.4 percent more so.

Power consumption is relevant in idle mode, Nelson notes in a release about this round of tests, "since many servers spend most of their time waiting for work." He cites Robert Frances Group's finding that the average utilization of most processors in a datacenter is between 15 and 20 percent.

In the previous test, the AMD-based server consumed 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle and waiting for work, Nelson reported.

Nelson used the same testing benchmarks in this test as he did in the previous one: He processed a series of Web transactions on both servers, which were running Suse Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, Apache2 Web server software, and MySQL relational database.

However, in this series of tests, he used an Opteron 2222 instead of the 8222 as in the previous matchup. "AMD offers a '2 socket' version of the Opteron as a model 2222. It has the same cache and frequency specifications as the model 8222, but the 2222 is limited to motherboards with a maximum of 2 sockets, and it is less expensive than the model 8222," according to Nelson's test report.

The performance differences between the two were negligible; generally, the 8222 was around 1.5 percent more efficient than the 2222.

In terms of cost, Nelson estimates that the 8GB configuration of the Xeon server would sell for about $4,651; the Opteron system would cost approximately $4,252. With 4GB of memory, the Xeon machine costs around $4,277 and the Opteron, $3,961.

For more information or to download a copy of the white paper outlining the test and results, go to worlds-fastest.com.

Posted by Ted Samson on August 6, 2007 01:37 PM

July 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Energy-efficiency battle is key in war between AMD and Intel

green tech, sustainable IT, energy efficient, AMD, Intel In the ongoing chip wars between AMD and Intel, the battle over power efficiency is heating up. With datacenter operators fixated on electric bills as well as their facilities' environmental impact, and with the EPA pondering Energy Star standards for server hardware, being able to claim the title of Most Energy-Efficient has become far more important.

Even being able to claim 10 percent superior energy efficiency can be a tremendous selling point for one of these chipmakers. If you have a datacenter with 5,000 machines and can save $20 per system per month on electricity, you're looking at pocketing $1.2 million per year. (I suspect there's savings on cooling, too, though I'm not sure how much that would be.)

Some independent groups have pitted AMD and Intel engines in power-efficiency tests, the results of which have cropped up in the past couple of weeks. If you've been reading my Sustainable IT blog, you'll have already read about one such study conducted by Neal Nelson and Associates. In it, Nelson pitted a 3GHz server running AMD Opteron against a 3GHz server running Intel Xeon.

Nelson determined that the AMD-based server used 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle and waiting for work.

That, he said, translates to annual electricity savings between $20.29 and $36.04 per server, depending on the workload, the study concluded. At idle speeds, it amounts to a $99.76 per-server, per-year saving.

The test elicited some heated discussion the likes of which you might expect during an election year. Some suggested that Nelson must have been paid off by AMD to have reached his findings; others aimed a bit higher than just below the belt, at least keeping comments and criticism in the context of Nelson's methodology instead of his morality.

Nelson still stands by his testing, though he plans to run more benchmarks using a new Intel processor. He expects to have results in around a week, and I'll share them.

AMD, not surprisingly, was quite pleased with Neal's results. Intel issued this statement: "We stand by all of our energy-efficient claims, period. We also recommend that IT managers who don't do their own in-house testing turn to the dozens to hundreds of independent and certifiable benchmark organizations for the best, most credible perspective."

As I said, Nelson's tests aren't the only ones to emerge in the past couple of weeks suggesting that AMD has developed more energy-efficient processors than Intel.

A couple of weeks ago over at Tom's Hardware, Bert Töpelt and Daniel Schuhmann posted the results of their own power-efficiency tests between several Intel and AMD processors. In terms of raw energy efficiency, AMD consistently had a better showing. "Whenever low acquisition costs, low follow-up costs, as well as low power consumption are important, AMD's processors are still first choice. AMD also currently offers the cheapest dual-core processor. Finally, AMD processors are very suitable for use in quiet systems," they concluded.

However, unlike Nelson, the guys over at Tom's considered other factors when rating the CPUs. In addition to energy efficiency, they equally weighted in chip price and performance. In that context, Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 topped anything AMD had -- though AMD's offerings are nearly all superior to the rest of Intel's.

Meanwhile, over at AnandTech, Jason Clark and Ross Whitehead recently had an AMD Opteron Socket-F machine square off against an Intel Xeon Woodcrest machine in what they dubbed a "Low-Power Server CPU Shoot-out." Their conclusion: "AMD is clearly the leader when it comes to performance per watt using the workloads in this article."

Interestingly, they attributed AMD's advantage not to the processor but to the fact that, unlike Intel, AMD doesn't employ fully buffered DIMMs. (In my Sustainable IT blog about Neal's test, one commenter suggested that "As for FB-DIMMS. It was Intel's decision, and they went the wrong path. And from the Wild Wild Web the information seems to be that future chipsets will not support FB-DIMMS due to lack of performance versus the power it consumes.")

My takeaway in all this is that, for the time being, AMD does appear to have an advantage over Intel, at least from a raw energy-efficiency standpoint, which is becoming increasingly important as datacenter operators grapple with high power and cooling bills. But the challenge remains of devising a useful and reliable metric for measuring energy consumption against overall performance.

That doesn't appear to be an easy task, given just how many factors there are to consider. Performance is, after all, a relative term, depending on what kind of tasks your servers are performing.

But you can expect that AMD and Intel will continue to weigh in on the discussion as groups such as the EPA and The Green Grid, as well as independent groups such as we here at InfoWorld, devise benchmarks for gauging energy efficiency. The stakes are simply too high to ignore.

Posted by Ted Samson on July 26, 2007 03:00 AM

July 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Study: AMD more power-efficient than Intel

AMD Opteron servers proved more energy efficient than those running Intel Xeon in a server-power-efficiency test performed by Neal Nelson and Associates.

Specifically, the independent computer-testing firm announced today that in the tests, "the AMD based server used 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle and waiting for work."

That translates to annual electricity savings between $20.29 per server and $36.04 per server, depending on the workload, the study concluded. At idle speeds, it amounts to a $99.76 per-server, per year saving.

"AMD must have put a lot of energy into optimizing the power usage for their products and it appears that AMD's customers will now realize significant energy savings," said Neal Nelson, president of the testing group, in a written statement.

Neal Nelson and Associates took a new approach for this test, employing at client-server benchmark where Web transactions were processed against a server running Novell SUSE Linux, Apache2, and MySQL. The tests were run on similarly configured 3GHz Intel (Woodcrest) Xeon and AMD Opteron servers, according to Neal Nelson and Associates.

Following is a table showing how the test broke down:

Not surprisingly, AMD was pleased with the test results, though as I write, no one at the company has had a chance to fully review the report. "While we did not review the methodology for these tests, we are not surprised by the results as they reiterate what we hear from customers and see in our own labs," said John Fruehe, manager of worldwide market development for server/workstation products at AMD, in a written statement. "We appreciate Neal's efforts to shed additional light on energy-efficient server computing, as it further validates what we've known is an important issue for our customers for some time. AMD is committed to delivering energy-efficient solutions to our customers, as you'll see when we roll-out our native Quad-Core processor, codenamed 'Barcelona,' (with the same power and thermals as our dual-core processors) later this summer ... ."

Intel issued this comment today: "We stand by all of our energy efficient claims, period. We also recommend that IT managers who don't do their own in-house testing turn to the dozens to hundreds of independent and certifiable benchmark organizations for the best, most credible perspective."

There is a thread on the subject below, and Neal Nelson has taken some time to address the specific questions and comments some of you have raised.

Also, there are discussions going on at Slashdot and Xtreme Systems.

For those of you who are interested in reading the specs on the servers and details of the test methodology, the report can be viewed here [PDF].

Posted by Ted Samson on July 20, 2007 12:52 PM

July 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Study: AMD more power-efficient than Intel

AMD Opteron servers proved more energy efficient than those running Intel Xeon in a server-power-efficiency test performed by Neal Nelson and Associates.

Following is a table showing how the test broke down:

There is a thread on the subject below, and Neal Nelson has taken some time to address the specific questions and comments some of you have raised.

Also, there are discussions going on at Slashdot and Xtreme Systems.

For those of you who are interested in reading the specs on the servers and details of the test methodology, the report can be viewed here [PDF].

Posted by Ted Samson on July 20, 2007 12:52 PM

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