On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Aaron Toponce <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 03:20:23PM -0600, Daniel Fussell wrote: > > Does anyone have any experience with the new Opterons that can confirm > > if they are DOA performance-wise? Or does recompiling with special gcc > > flags to optimize the multiply ordering restore AMD's standing for > > threaded server performance? > > I have experience with the Intel Westmere Xeons and AMD Shanghai Opterons, > but not with Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer. With that said, I wouldn't > necessarily say that AMD is getting their butt handed to them on a silver > platter. From my experience AMD is very much in the game, performance-wise, > and this article from Phoronix confirms: > > > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=1 > > From the article: > > Between Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer for KVM > virtualization, the relative performance was generally quite close > between these competing latest-generation architectures. If looking > at the harmonic mean of the over three dozen tests that were run, the > Intel Core i7 3960X was running at 93% the speed of bare metal with > KVM while the AMD FX-8150 came in at 90% the speed of the bare metal > Bulldozer. Alternatively, with the geometric mean of all the results, > the i7-3960X was at 85% the speed of bare metal while the AMD FX-8150 > was at 88%. VirtualBox on the FX-8150 was at 85% while the > problematic VirtualBox-on-Sandy-E was at 59%. Xen on Sandy-E came in > at 94%. > > They had issues with their ASUS motherboard, so AMD Xen benchmarks weren't > taken. > > -- > . o . o . o . . o o . . . o . > . . o . o o o . o . o o . . o > o o o . o . . o o o o . o o o > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > Something else to remember is that the cpus to use should reflect what the virtual machines are doing. I have been in a number of situations where I wanted lower clock speed but more cores (read "Buy AMD") for some applications and fewer cores that deliver better single core performance (read "Buy Intel"). In the end, I normally want more cores when doing virtualization, otherwise I would not generally be virtualizing... Finally, remember to look up the right benchmarks. Aaron cited a great article because it tested the actual capabilities of the CPUS in a virtualization environment, unlike using a windows desktop benchmark, since a windows desktop is not something you generally virtualize... /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
