X-bit labs

ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 11)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/21/2003 | 05:53 PM ]

Performance: Synthetic Benchmarks and Memory Tests

Before we pass over to fully-fledged testing of a workstation based on AMD Opteron Processor, we decided to evaluate the performance of the dual-channel memory controller integrated into it. I wonder if the memory controller built into the Opteron processor will be able to outperform the latest dual-channel memory controller used in Intel’s i875P chipset. For this purpose we resorted to the means that stood all tests of time: the good old Cachemem benchmark:

As we see from the memory bandwidth numbers during various operations, the leadership here belongs to Intel Pentium 4. Actually, no wonder. The thing is that there is dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM used together with the Pentium 4 processor, while the fastest memory supported by AMD Opteron is DDR333 SDRAM. And it is not AMD engineers who are to blame for any sluggishness here. Opteron processor is intended primarily for server systems and high-performance workstations. That is why AMD decided to make its solution support only Registered memory modules with ECC. These modules are, firstly, more reliable, and secondly, can be of bigger capacity. However, unfortunately, there are simply no Registered DDR400 SDRAM DIMMs in the market. As a result, the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the memory bus in Opteron systems can reach only 5.4GB/sec yielding to Pentium 4 systems with 800MHz bus, which boast up to 6.4GB/sec peak bandwidth. At the same time, we can’t help saying that the use of integrated memory controller did have a positive effect for AMD. The memory latency in Opteron based system appeared the lowest of all.

We would also like to point out very good results obtained when only one memory channel of the Opteron based system was involved. As we see, the operations with the memory are not any slower than by Athlon XP 3200+ with dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM and 400MHz system bus.

Anyway, we can state that when processing large amounts of data a workstation built on Opteron processor from AMD would definitely show its best due to highly efficient memory controller and 1MB big L2 cache with exclusive architecture.

Performance: Data Encoding

In this section we are going to check how well a workstation built of AMD Opteron processor and ASUS SK8N mainboard will cope with data encoding and streaming data processing (audio and video). Although this is not a very typical task for a workstation, we couldn’t leave it out.

We have already pointed out more than once that high-speed ALU is required to ensure high-speed MP3 encoding. That is why Pentium 4 with its powerful Hyper-Threading technology wins this test. Opteron working at a not very high core clock frequency of only 1.8GHz, even falls behind the fastest Athlon XP processors.