[Beowulf] Intel Quad-Core or AMD Opteron

[Li, Bo]

Intel does very well with its compiler and performance tuning tools. And for AMD system, you can try Pathscale's product for compilers. It is really a powerful tool, especially for AMD clusters with InfiniPath.
AMD is working hard in software area. Hopefully, we can power AMD clusters in better way.
Regards,
Li, Bo
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <mcosta at fc.up.pt>
To: "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl>
Cc: "beowulf" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2007 10:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Intel Quad-Core or AMD Opteron


> Citando Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl>:
> 
>> Even worse,
>>
>> Does SSE2 code of intel not by default in th eintel primitives have an 'if
>> then else' that at opteron it runs without using SIMD?
> 
> We used ACML on Opterons and MKL on Xeons.
> 
>> But apart from that, SIMD at oldie K8 is very slow compared to core2,
>> though not a factor 2. Barcelona for well optimized code should have an
>> IPC in SIMD of up to 40+% faster i guess than core2.
>>
>> So only 2 questions are when they release and especially at *what* price
>> for the 4 socket mainboards.
>>
>> A 16 core barcelona machine with 4 DDR2 memory controllers might be a very
>> mighty system for all kind of applications that need shared memory to
>> scale well.
>>
>> When releasing Barcelona core within a few months from now, AMD has a huge
>> lead over intel with respect to 4 core cpu's, as it seems to me.
>>
>> I feel personally intels choice of CPU design using small tiny L1 caches
>> from performance viewpoint is a catastrophic one. If there is just ONE
>> competitor for an intel chip that manages to clock a cpu nearly at the
>> same clock like intel and with the same number of cores, then intel
>> usually gets totally outperformed. Now that intel & AMD produce
>> cpu's at the same type of machines their cpu's, it seems to me
>> that AMD will in general outperform intel.
>>
>> Comparing the 2006 core2 with a 2003 release is not a very fair
>> compare IMHO.
> 
> We just compared what was available at the time, there's nothing more  
> we could do. I do think that AMD's architecture scales better, and  
> that eventually, as the number of cores and sockets increases, Intel  
> will switch to integrated memory controllers and some form of cpu to  
> cpu bus.
> 
>> We can definitely conclude that intel managed to produce their new
>> generation cpu ( core2) more than 1 year sooner than AMD did do, using a
>> simple trick, namely glueing 2 dual core chips together.
> 
> That's right, and in that interval they managed to get ahead, for some  
> applications at least.
> 
> There is already a "true" quad-core in their roadmap, isn't there?
> 
>>
>> In the meantime i keep wondering more and more about intel not having an
>> equivalent on the market for AMD's hypertransport.
> 
> Yep. I do agree with everything you say, I just think that the  
> comparison between Xeon's and Opteron's for high performance computing  
> is getting harder, since before the em64t I would (and did) choose  
> Opterons.
> 
> Miguel
> 
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