X-bit labs

Workstation Processors Duel: AMD Opteron against Intel Xeon (page 16)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/21/2005 | 08:44 PM ]

ScienceMark 2.0

ScienceMark 2.0 benchmark shows the system performance in typical scientific algorithms used in mathematical modeling tasks.

We have already pointed out before that ScienceMark 2.0 benchmark is optimized for platforms with two logical processors. It means that the calculations in this test are split into two parallel streams and do not load most of the systems we are discussing today to the full extent. Therefore, the system with two Opteron 254 CPUs is ahead of all here.

Mathematica 5.2

Another computational task included into our test session is the mathematical benchmarking suite called Mathematica that is intended for scientific and engineering tasks. Especially, since the new version 5.2 of this software acquired SMP support.

Workstations built with dual-core processors didn’t reveal any significant advantages in Mathematica 5.2. As we found out having analyzed the results, this suite can load only two logical processors at the same time (though not up to 100%), just like ScienceMark. Therefore, it doesn’t make much practical sense to use platforms capable of processing multiple parallel threads for work with this type of software.

At the same time I would like to point out surprisingly high result obtained on a system built with Xeon 3.6GHz processors. According to the numbers we got, it outperforms a system with Opteron 254 working at 2.8GHz by about 60%. Looks like Mathematica 5.2 favors NetBurst architecture, which boasts one significant advantage: fast ALU working at twice the CPU frequency.