[Beowulf] Q: AMD Opteron (Barcelona) 2356 vs Intel Xeon 5460

[Tim Chipman]

Very likely a hopeless question, with this little information, but just in case: 

Does anyone have any 'real world' experience with 'both' of these CPUs, in terms of relative performance for 'whatever work you do' ?

I realize the xeon is a faster mhz part (3.16ghz xeon vs 2.3ghz opteron) so I'm more concerned with "relative performance per mhz"

I'm involved with a cluster project, and we have 2 options from our vendor,

- 25 compute nodes, dual-quadcore intel 5460, or
- 32 compute nodes, dual-quadcore amd 2356

>From what I've been able to glean (Spec.org / SpecCPU 2006),

- the intel chips have better integer performance
- the amd chips have better FPU performance

so the likely anticipated real-world performance result .. will depend on how a given application blends / balances things.

Any comments / thoughts are certainly appreciated.


--Tim Chipman