Tech Report's Shanghai Review/benchmarks

About what I expected to see. Opty's shine in multithreaded apps due to it's native quad-core design. Workstation apps suffer. But, who runs workstation apps on a server?

Overall they are cheap, perform well and should put AMD back on the map in the server market.
 
HydroBudz said:
About what I expected to see. Opty's shine in multithreaded apps due to it's native quad-core design. Workstation apps suffer. But, who runs workstation apps on a server?
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I also questioned the need for the workstation benches there since those systems are pretty much nothing close to what you'd expect inside a workstation, besides maybe the CPUs and copious amounts of RAM. I guess it's somewhat interesting to see just for curiosity's sake as to how much of an improvement has been made in that area. Intel still dominates the crap out of the workstation market in benchmarks and will obviously do so until a completely new architecture comes out of AMD.

Anyway validity of the testing suite aside, the Shanghai looks to be an improvement in every and any way possible over Barcelona. I hope AMD can manage to get a stronger foothold in the server market with it before Bloomfield (Nahalem) comes to the party. AMD's sales team is probably working 24/7 to try and get this new chip into anything it can quick. Too bad this isn't exactly a happy time to be selling...anything.

It'll be very interesting to see the results of the power efficiency battle between Shanghai and Bloomfield. Now that they both have an IMC and both use DDR-type memories, the field should be much more even with which to judge the power needs of each CPU (aside from DDR2 vs DDR3 power draw). I think the fight will be especially focused on the performance per watt stat for the immediate future.

Looking at the power draw of the L5340 + 5100 MCH in the article, if Intel can continue that trend with the Bloomfield CPUs then AMD is going to be in trouble. After the initial period where AMD will basically be the only 4P-8P player in town with a new gen part (until Intel brings out Boxboro), AMD will again be forced to compete based on a performance per watt per dollar standpoint. That'll be a hard corner to work from while waiting patiently for their next architecture launch and Intel still has Westmere to unwrap in the meantime. The more things change, the more they stay the same, man.
 
Silent.Sin said:
... After the initial period where AMD will basically be the only 4P-8P player in town ....
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Where does this misconception came from ?

I mean , even in the worst moments , Paxville era , Intel held over 50% of the 4P market.Their situation only improved , especially in the last year.
AMD is more or less a non player in anything above 4P ( meaning 8P , they don't have a solution for larger than 8P ) due to scaling issues given the current system arch.That's IBM and Unisys turf for high end x86 , Xeons and highly expensive proprietary chipsets and crossbars.
 
This is probably a stupid question, but why can't they get a mobo that supports shanghai with a PCI-E x16 slot so they can do a review of it with games?
 
savantu said:
Where does this misconception came from ?

I mean , even in the worst moments , Paxville era , Intel held over 50% of the 4P market.Their situation only improved , especially in the last year.
AMD is more or less a non player in anything above 4P ( meaning 8P , they don't have a solution for larger than 8P ) due to scaling issues given the current system arch.That's IBM and Unisys turf for high end x86 , Xeons and highly expensive proprietary chipsets and crossbars.
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I didn't mean in market share I just meant in actual performance terms and the fact that it is the newest CPU from AMD where Intel's is not their latest, sorry I didn't really emphasize that enough. AMD is still very competitive in performance-per-watt in any new 4P rack. If you could and needed to buy a 4P system right now after seeing those benchmarks would you at least consider it?
 
Silent.Sin said:
I didn't mean in market share I just meant in actual performance terms and the fact that it is the newest CPU from AMD where Intel's is not their latest, sorry I didn't really emphasize that enough. AMD is still very competitive in performance-per-watt in any new 4P rack. If you could and needed to buy a 4P system right now after seeing those benchmarks would you at least consider it?
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While Shanghai offers good perf/w , it needs to be compared with Dunnington on 4P workloads.Intel wins most of the industry standard benchmarks in that area ( whatever their worth might be ) and even if their products were sometimes at a disadvantage performance of power wise , they offered consistency and superb RAS.
AMD failed badly on both and given the fact that such purchases are planned well in advance , they might have skipped quite a few customers after the K10 disaster.By the time they're lured back , Intal launches Beckton which will soundly obliterate anything else on the market.

When Shanghai is in full swing , so will be 2P Nehalem.I'm willing to bet that there will be quite a few cases where 2P Nehalem will beat 4P Shanghai.
 
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