X-bit labs

ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 12)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

During data compression with the help of some ordinary archiving utilities, the memory subsystem performance affects the results most of all. Therefore, Opteron with the built-in dual-channel memory controller and 1MB L2 cache almost catches up with the fastest Pentium 4 models, even despite its relatively low core clock.

Canopus ProCoder used for professional videos digitizing, has always run very well on AMD processors. This proves true in our case, too. Although we have to stress that Opteron performs slower than the top Athlon XP models because of its lower working frequency.

CPUs with NetBurst architecture cope perfectly well with video encoding into MPEG-4 format. Besides, Hyper-Threading technology also improves the result shown by Pentium 4. As a result, AMD processors appear in the very end of the race falling quite noticeably behind the top Pentium 4 models.

We see very similar picture when using Windows Media Encoder 9. A workstation based on AMD Opteron fails to show its best in this application, too.

As a result, we can conclude that Opteron based systems do not cope very well with data encoding tasks, especially against a colorful background of more successful competitors. In fact, the situation has hardly changed compared with what Athlon XP showed us during the tests. This is pretty logical, of course, as both CPUs have very similar architectures. As for Intel, they optimized their CPUs for streaming data processing tasks from the very beginning, that is why we are not at all surprised to see how high the results shown by Pentium 4 processor are.