I've finally banned SVB. That's enough trolling for one lifetime--or several. Apologies for not getting to it sooner; I was out at a funeral yesterday.

It's just about done.
Seriously, I want to thank snowdog and damage for their examples that raised objections to my arguments. Understanding them gave me an important clue to explain the problem with the benchmarks.

I should have realized that on Spec CPU2000 that Intel and AMD would scale identically. A little history. For those that didn't know, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce (the founders of Intel) and Jerry Sanders (the founder of AMD) worked for Fairchild Semiconductor and were friendly. When IBM wanted to use the 8086 for their PC, the insisted that Intel have a second source so Bob and Gordon went to their bud, Jerry, as the second source. Intel supplied the masks and AMD fabbed. This worked well until Andy (Only the Paranoid Survive) Grove became chair of Intel and wanted the x86 market to himself. Law suit 1 followed and AMD won the right to continue to fab x86 clones from the Intel masks. Intel went to the 486 and AMD reverse engineered it and produced an exact copy. Lawsuit 2 followed and AMD was given access to Intel IP (I'm not sure I agree with the judge's decision and I think other factors such as maintaining competition may have entered into the decision). There was some further negotiation and the result was that AMD and Intel have cross licensed each others IP. Bottom line was that the Intel 486 and the AMD 486 are identical, micro-op for micro-op. Run them at the same clock and the execute programs in identical times. The were also socket interchangable so that if you didn't like Intel on your Intel board, you could always switch to an AMD processor. So AMD and Intel run base x86 code and MMX at the same IPC.
This is the interesting point with the Intel compilers. If the cpu string is not "GENUINEINTEL" then the compiler defaults to 486 code. AMD and Intel run at exactly the same IPC. If the procesor is "GENUINEINTEL" then the SSE optimizations are included. So it isn't really necessary to get an "AUTHENTICAMD" processor to run AMD vs. Intel comparisons with the Intel compilers. Run the benchmark normally for the Intel scores. Recompile the benchmark without the SSE optimizations, run it on the Intel porcessor and get the AMD scores. This will save Damage a lot of time and money in testing because he won't have to get an AMD board for comparison. Even simpler, run any SSE benchmark once on an Intel 25Mhz 486, multiply by the clock frequency of the AMD chip to be tested and divide by 25 and obtain the score for the latest AMD chip. Try it. And if anyone now thinks benchmarks using Intel compiles are legitimate, I have swamp land in Florida to sell.

Running any benchmark which contains SSE code on the Intel Optimizing compilers is only a comparison of the benchmark on a fast 486 vs. the latest and greatest from Intel

So much spin and so little information. I found the review at Anand's very interesting. In fritzchess Intel was 10% better per clock. In the Intel optimized Linpack, Intel was 5% better per clock. In the other 5 benchmarks, AMD was 0 to 20% better per clock. AMD has a higher IPC and Intel has a faster clock. Because of the much higher clocking, Intel still has the "performance" edge.
It should be interesting to make a performance comparison in about 3 to 6 months. Intel will have Penryn and AMD should have the second spin of Barcelona. Traditionally AMD makes substantial performance improvements between the first and second spins (25-50%)

I apologize in advance for this long opinion. Both Intel and AMD are competing violently. Which is great for us consumers.

I really enjoyed this review alot. Always loved Techreport to put things in layman's terms for people to understand everything from Rendering to Power draw. I have high hopes for AMD to stay alive and continue to bring things to the table and compete with Intel and bring new things to ALL of us. I see theres alot of people rooting for the Blue team and the Green team. Show loyalty to your family and friends before Blue or Green.

Things to remind from about 5+ years ago. AMD put out their X2's and spanked the benchmarks across the board. Intel couldnt make anything close for all that time being until they came out with Conroe a odd few years later. About 1 year later AMD at least responded to a new product thats in the same ball park. They had to. Their wallets are no where near as deep to Intel's to keep making crappy lines of CPUs for years and relying on the Intel name brand and marketing ploys to sell. The X2's only made AMD sat on their first golden product like fat wealthy men wearing their monocles and drinking tea, (while that..... Intel FINALLY put their engineers to work and unleashed a beast as X2 once was).

Conroe Definition=Lower Power draw, Clock to Clock better performance, and high overclock potential compared to X2s.

Conroe has only been out for about a year and some months and its already obsolete. Intel had to make the q6X00 series because they knew AMD was already on the quad path before Conroe. The Barcelona was AMD's only potential to make the comeback. Intel HAD to beat them to the Quad Core just as they were once beaten to Dual Cores..

Back to todays Date, AMD rushed out some low Clock Barcelonas (premature baby Cpus I.M.O.) for their first Quad line.

We all saw the benches and they are contending pretty decent with Intels teenaged Xeons, and with some damn low surprising power consumption as Conroe once surprised us. Im thinking about the 2.5ghz 2360 SE and the 3.0ghz 5365! AMD is .5 ghz behind and not getting as spanked in something that means alot to me as an Animator, and thats Rendering. Only 9sec. and 0.5ghz behind.

I cant wait till Techreport starts overclocking or shows a stock 3.0ghz (when/If AMD delivers), and find out if its overclock roof is as high as the Conroes. Then maybe these Barcy's might earn some more credit and respect. Remember the Benches for the X2s and Conroes? You have to up the clock on a X2 at least 0.2 ghz to compete with a Conroe on most benches...

Today i saw a 2.0ghz Barcy compete really well with a 2.33ghz Xeon, and it had lower power consumption.

Oh what about the Penryn's and Phenoms? Thats when ill consider to buy a Quad Core. AND thats when we'll see some REAL toe to toe fighting.. Both these releases will be the ironed out current server technologies on smaller cpus. Intel is bragging about Penryn being the real competition. From the benches of present day, its 45nm, 10% lower power usage and 5% better performance than Conroe. Last time i heard, thats pretty much how Phenom is being compared to Barcelona on 65nm and Barcelona is contending very well. But honestly WHO cares who gets smaller first, Really now did that make you guys consider size will be the deal breaker in a CPU purchase? Another thought, How many of us have waited for this Barcy before really considering buying a Xeon? Theyre both server chips and alot of money if you do not intend to use it for business purposes. Oh thats right Fan Boys would buy it (or pretend they did) for bragging rights on these forums..Its Your money not mine.. ill wait for Penryn and Phenom.

IF AMD and INtel are just as equal in clock to clock and Overclock potential in the benches, then finally.... our CPU companies are closer to being honest and not fooling any one with Price and Performance.

No more market gimmicks. No more personal lab paper benchmarks... just give us a great Price & raw Performance

(oh & dont forget the motherboard prices lol)

:o)

RealWorldTech offers a perspective on the Barcelona launch. Nothing particularly new, but it's a balanced viewpoint assessing it entirely (and appropriately) in the server context. In other words, it's a long way away from the fanboy lanparty desktop viewpoint you see in some of the threads here.

And TR gets a shout out for offering the best review of the chip so far.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?NewsID=375&date=09-13-2007#375

Good review.

As i see it: AMD has lost again ;)

At best they can match the clock-for-clock performance of Conroe. Since Intel has almost 50% higher clockspeed performance AND experience together with 45nm process, which lets them produce chips way cheaper than AMD- i see no real light at the end of the tunnel, that AMD is in since a pretty long time now. IMO AMD has to reach 3Ghz und get 45nm chips soon, or they'll be doomed ;)

well, thanks for the review. My company is in need of a server upgrade and I was wondering who I should go with. Intel is just too hard to pass up performance wise and most importantly, cost wise.

Amazing to me is that some people read these bench marks and see it as a tie. I went through and highlighted the percent wins in the clock for clock comparison. 2350 vs 5335 at 2GHz. I left out the cache memory access because is no a benchmark that actually tests any application performance. I also left out Mandlebrot which does seem very Intel optimized.

Here is the Percent wins in benchmarks clock to clock: Intel in Red , AMD appropriately in Green. It looks like a couple of marginal single digit wins for AMD, and a bunch of significant double digit wins for Intel. Hardly a tie IMO.

SpecJBB: 2%
Valve: 13%
CineBench: 12%
PovRay: 4%
Myri: Tie
Stars: 15%
Folding: 3%
PanFac: 13%
PicColor: 25%
WME: 6%

You can't reach conspiracy theorists (CTs) with reason.

If someone believes the CIA brought down the buildings on 9/11 with a controlled demolition. No amount of scientific evidence or reasonable argument will convince them to the contrary.

Likewise if someone thinks that a great conspiracy is taking place to tilt benchmarks in Intels favor by using the Intel compiler that exists seemingly for no other purpose they can not be persuaded to the contrary by facts or reasonable argument.

For the reasonable people, who may be swayed by voluminous arguments from the CT's. Here are some things to think about.

The Intel compiler is chosen in many high performance situations because it yields the fastest code on both platforms. It is widely used by AMD for it's own specCPU benchmarking entries.
http://www.spec.org/
Apparently AMD must be biased against AMD to use this Intel compiler?

Testing on SpecCPU shows that AMD benefits as much as Intel from the Intel compiler:
http://www.principledtechnologies.com/clients/reports/Intel/CompCom...

Next a CT might respond that this is because SpecCPU is simplistic 486 code and doesn't use SSE. Nothing can be further from the truth. Do a search on spec Cpu2000 and SSE and you find it takes advantage of SSE optimizations and code and it is not a simplistic benchmark either but a suite of applications/algorithms. As of Feburary 2007 it was retired for Cpu2006 which is much more complex suite make much more use of SSE. Still using Intel compilers again.

Or the CT might latch onto some point in the past when Intel checked if it was one of their Own CPUs before enabling SSE optimizations (not their job to find out otherwise) but they wouldn't dig deep enough to find that with SSE opt flags now it doesn't check at all and the code may actually just crash if SSE is not present.

In short Intel makes a great compiler, it is used by people who want to squeeze the greatest performance out of any applications and produces SSE optimizations that work on both Intel and AMD chips.

But hey you are probably a reasonable person and already knew that.

SVB` struggling here is comedy gold :))

/takes note to check back later

A mixed bag of benches and workloads are shown here, but let's look at what it really means for AMD:
- Drop in replacement for Socket 1207 boards. OEMs can deliver solutions almost immediately with these chips.
- A clock for clock performance increase with headroom to grow (vs. the current chip and hitting it's limits).
- Smaller parity against Intel's chips at the same price.
- Still low(er) power consumption compared to competition.

These chips are obviously NOT the Core2 killers, but who *truly* believed they would be? I, for one, knew these chips would be faster than current Opty's, but wouldn't slaughter Xeons across the board.

Hey I dunno, but when I look at the picture in the cinebench, I see the xCPU thing at 22472, but the highest you noted on your chart is 16546 for the cinebench cpu score, maybe I am reading it wrong or something, may I get some clarification??

............
(I didn't have this comment replying in the right place. So I moved it -- you can read it in its entirety down below. I don't remove my comments. Unlike some people).

Huh. Seems like the market is headed towards a near-parity stalemate. Is perhaps the laws of physics/diminishing returns responsible for this?

A side question:

What the heck is "Rapid Virtualization Indexing" exactly?

(I know its supposed to accelerate something that plays an important role in virtualization performance, but not sure of the details).

Its tooted in AMD's presentation slides, but it would be nice if we can see this feature be benchmarked or compared in some way. (Not mentioned in this article for some reason).

ima jump on that 2.5.

AMD is back in the game, but they're not winning any championships yet . . .

S939 for life! Until We get past Vista or some amazing gotta have app comes out, I'm gonna 3800x2 it for life...

AMD should have stuck with socket 939

*ducks

That was a launch? Did others who surf many tech sites notice a distinct lack of a splash or any excitement?

Did AMD do something to sour relations with hardware sites, it barely warranted a mention on most hardware sites.

I would think with months of secrecy not letting anyone near a Barcelona, they would have an NDA expire yesterday releasing a hoard of reviews across all the major hardware sites.

While AMD will be bashed by most for not beating Intel across the board, let's look at this from a business prospective.

If all I have to do as a business owner is drop in a new processor and not change ANYTHING (no reloading any windows or server software or chipset software . . .nothing) and get more power for the same (or maybe less) power bill . . I call that a success at anytime.

Good Review.
Regarding WME not being able to create more than 4 threads:
Why don't you use x264 to test video encoding performance? I see so many hardware review sites usign quicktime, xvid, or windows media to test the performance, but x264 scales the best with cores, and is one of (if not the) most advanced and efficient video codec out there. And it's FOSS. You can get the newest build at x264.nl and if you like a good frontend (GUI) called megui on the doom9 forums. x264 should scale to more than 4 cores, but if it doesn't, you can always leave a comment for the developers.

Nice article. It will be painful to see a more elegant system architecture get trounced on the desktop front in terms of raw performance, so here is to hoping the gap won't be too wide. :)

Just a quick question: any reason why Barcelona is on a nForce Pro 3600-based SuperMicro board and the traditional Opterons are on a ServerWorks BCM 5780-based Tyan board?

Thanks.

Come spring will I be buying a Penryn or a Phenom? I dunno...

Now if they just make a S939 version ....

*hides*

There's a discussion of TR's numbers on the SPECjbb test by some of the experts over at RWT:
http://realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=82686&th...

Interestingly, they note that the Sun JVM has a 10-20% perf disadvantage relative to JRockit on 64bit; many of the most recent top scores posted at spec.org use JRockit (which is generally faster all around) so keep that in mind when comparing scores.

When it comes to comparing Xeon to Opteron, it appears disabling hardware prefetch on the Xeon gains 25% on this benchmark
http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005/results/res2007q2/jbb2005-20070326-...
vs
http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005/results/res2007q2/jbb2005-20070326-...

(Note those tests were done by AMD)

Review mentioned at ARS : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070910-barcelonas-out-and-th...
"...There aren't many reviews out this morning, and the few that are up aren't worth looking at (see the next section for why this is the case). The only bright spot in this picture is Scott's review at Tech Report..."

Also (perhaps) of note : "AMD sells 15,000 Barcelona chips to one user as it launches new Intel fight"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleB...

Gotta say, the way Anand's articles / comparisons are set up are very very very helpful.

I'm concerned about the SPECjbb2005 results.

See the submitted results for dual X5365 systems from Fujitsu-Siemens as well as Dell for their PowerEdge 1950 here --

http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/res2007q3/

All have got dual processors (8 cores), and are scoring well over 230,000 each. Not tuning the system to perform well is one thing, but it's a little fishy when submitted results show nearly three times the scores on similar hardware.

Also note the score Fujitsu-Siemens' dual Opteron 2220 system gets here --

http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/res2007q2/jbb2005-20070411-0028...

Nearly 90,000 bops vs 52,438 bops that your testing revealed.

Might there be something wrong?