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AMD's quad-core Opteron 2300 "Barcelona" CPU Review

@ 2007/09/10

Somewhere around mid-morning this past Friday, a rather large package made its way into the depths of Damage Labs. Inside was a server containing something very special: a pair of AMD's new quad-core Opteron processors. The chip code-named "Barcelona" has been something of an enigma during its development, both because of questions about exactly when it would arrive and how it would perform when it did. After a long, hot weekend of non-stop testing, we have some answers to those questions. AMD is formally introducing its Barcelona-based Opteron 2300-series processors today, so the time is now. As for the performance, well, keep reading to see exactly how the new Opterons compare to Intel's quad-core Xeons.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/10

15% over K8 is not enough to come even with Core 2 Duo...

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/09/10

Quote:

Originally Posted by thorgal

This is different from Anand's conclusion, where Phenom is about 15% faster clock for clock.

compared to a K8

Comment from thorgal @ 2007/09/10

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

There goes the Phenom ? :/

This is different from Anand's conclusion, where Phenom is about 15% faster clock for clock.

Comment from Kougar @ 2007/09/10

AMD seems to be pulling off some good results in the server tests. Single chip desktop use, aka Phenom is about the worst case scenario for Barcelona. I'd rather AMD perform well in the server space than in the desktop space... they only make their real money from the server market.

Also I am looking forward to some updated boards, old boards do not support Barcelona's split power plane ability, and so the onboard memory controller is effectively running "underclocked". Anandtech's Server-side review uses a board that supports this ability, but I don't think TR's setup can.

Comment from Rutar @ 2007/09/10

At least they keep the price level low but selling an expensive chip cheaper than the competitors product that is cheaper to make hurts.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/10

Quote:

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.

There goes the Phenom ? :/

Quote:

The new Barcelona-based quad-core Opterons bring major performance gains over their dual-core predecessors while fitting comfortably into the same power and thermal envelopes. Doubling the number of CPU cores will take you a long way in the server/workstation space, where the usage models tend to involve explicitly parallel workloads. The new Opterons also bring improved clock-for-clock performance in some cases, most notably with SSE-intensive applications like the Folding@Home Gromacs core. However, Barcelona's gains in performance per clock aren't quite what we expected, especially in floating-point-intensive applications like 3D rendering, where it looks for all the world like a quad-core K8. As a result, Barcelona is sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and oftentimes the equal of Intel's Core microarchitecture, MHz for MHz. Given the current clock speed situation, that's a tough reality.

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