Two-Way AMD Opteron System

I think many readers would be interested in looking at the performance of a dual-processor platform in this test. Before proceeding to Intel’s processors, let’s have a look at the results of a system with two Opteron 254 processors clocked at 2800MHz.

Pic.8: Dual-processor AMD Opteron system. Sequential reading of
non-modified data loaded into the cache of the other core.

Pic.9: Dual-processor AMD Opteron system. Random reading of
non-modified data loaded into the cache of the other core.

Pic.10: Dual-processor AMD Opteron system. Sequential reading of the data
modified in the cache of the other core.

Pic.11: Dual-processor AMD Opteron system. Random reading of the data
modified in the cache of the other core.

The results are similar to those of the Athlon 64 X2, but the latencies are bigger, especially at random access. The anomalous distribution of latencies at sequential access (higher latencies are observed with smaller data blocks) is probably due to the overhead for data transfers over the HyperTransport bus which worsens the average result when small data blocks are processed. It is clear that a dual-core processor is more efficient than two single-core ones when common data are processed.