Cinebench
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

I had high hopes for Barcelona's purported improvements in floating-point math, but we're just not seeing it here. Have a look at the single-threaded performance of the Opteron 2218 HE (at 2.6GHz) versus the Opteron 2360 SE (at 2.5GHz): performance per clock is nearly identical between K8 and Barcelona. The one saving grace for the new Opterons is strong multi-threaded scaling. The Xeon E5345 is faster than the 2360 SE with one thread but slower with eight. Put another way, the E5345 offer a 6.2X speedup with multithreading, while the Barcelona's is nearly 7X.

POV-Ray rendering
We caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The latest beta 64-bit executable is still quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but it should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

Again, we're seeing strong performance scaling with Barcelona, but not dominance in floating-point math. The Xeon L5335 at 2GHz is just a few ticks behind the 2GHz Opteron 2350.

I decided to go ahead and report these results for the sake of completeness, but I don't believe they're telling us much about the new Opterons' competence. This beta version of POV-Ray seems to have a problem with single-threaded tasks bouncing around from one CPU core to the next, and this causes especially acute problems on NUMA systems. Since the vast majority of the computation time for these scene involves such single-threaded work, things turn out badly for the Opteron 2300s.