X-bit labs

Workstation Processors Duel: AMD Opteron against Intel Xeon (page 21)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

AutoCAD 2006

AutoCAD 2006 is a popular software tool for computer-aided design systems.

Just like the viewport in 3D modeling applications, AutoCAD uses practically no multi-threading. Therefore, the winner here is an Opteron 254 based system, just like in other similar cases we have already discussed today. This system demonstrates high “pure” performance of each logical (and physical) CPU.

FLUENT 6.2.16

In conclusion I would like to discuss the results obtained during our workstation testing in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) system aka FLUENT, which belongs to a group pf powerful computational applications. FLUENT software suite is a very popular “heavy” CFD package. CFD is a computational technology that enables you to study the dynamics of things that flow. Using CFD, you build a computational model that represents a system or device that you want to study. Then you apply the fluid flow physics to this virtual prototype, and the software outputs a prediction of the fluid dynamics. CFD is a sophisticated analysis technique. It not only predicts fluid flow behavior, but also the transfer of heat, mass (such as in perspiration or dissolution), phase change (such as in freezing or boiling), chemical reaction (such as combustion), mechanical movement (such as an impeller turning), and stress or deformation of related solid structures (such as a mast bending in the wind).

First of all, I would like to stress that FLUENT belongs to those few applications that can distribute calculations efficiently between any number of logical processors. Therefore, here we see an indisputable advantage of workstations built with dual-core processors over the systems using their single-core analogs. The unique thing about FLUENT is that dual-core Xeon processors perform very well there. Moreover, dual-core Xeon 2.8GHz managed to outperform dual-core Opteron CPUs in one of the tests, which is a very unusual thing to happen.