Dedicated Servers, Hosting Industry, Technology

Intel Woodcrest, AMD’s Opteron and Sun’s UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

Featuring one of the processors that Superb offers in our dedicated servers, the Intel Woodcrest, this is a great article that compares three of the major server CPU manufacturers. In four years, AMD’s Opteron gained a 48% share of the US and a 36% share of the worldwide four socket server market. The response by Intel to this pressure from competition was the Woodcrest chip. Some of the results:

  • The new Woodcrest is about 20-25% faster than the fastest dual-core Opteron.
  • A 7% clockspeed advantage (most likely a result of the fact that the Woodcrest was baked with a newer 65nm process).
  • When it comes to integer performance, the Woodcrest numbers are simply stunning and vastly superior to any other architecture.
  • Overall: The Intel Xeon 5160, a.k.a. Woodcrest, will simply be the most powerful server CPU this year

Intel Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest)
Advantages:

  • Best server performance across all applications
  • Best Performance/Watt in the high end
  • Absolutely stunning web server performance
  • FB-DIMM enables high RAM capacity and bandwidth (quad channel)

Disadvantages:

  • Needs SSE optimized code for some special case code (RSA, AES)
  • FB-DIMM adds extra latency, cost (small) and power

For the full article, see this link: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2772