X-bit labs

ASUS SK8N + AMD Opteron 144: Uniprocessor Workstation on AMD Opteron and NVIDIA nForce3 Professional (page 13)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Performance: Scientific Calculations

To test the performance of an Opteron based system in scientific applications, we resorted to ScienceMark 2.0 test, which shows how quickly the typical mathematics modeling algorithms can be processed.

Athlon XP is fairly considered to be the best processor for scientific calculations due to its powerful three-pipeline FPU unit. By Opteron this unit remained almost unchanged. However, the core clock rate got considerably lower than that of Athlon XP processors. As a result, Opteron falls behind Athlon XP in all tests, and in every two tests out of three it also falls behind the top Pentium 4 processor model. All in all, Opteron appears not the best choice for scientific calculations today. At least in those tasks, which do not take advantage of AMD64 technology.

Besides ScienceMark 2.0 test, we decided to check the performance of the new processor in a distributed computing client of the Russian MD@home project, calculating the dynamic features of olygopeptides (protein ferments) with the help of molecular dynamics methods.

Again there is nothing optimistic about the results of AMD Opteron. This processor definitely lacks core frequency. However, some production problems still do not allow AMD to increase the core clock rate of its Opteron processors at least up to the level of top Athlon XP models.