10-19-2005, 10:28 PM
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#26 (permalink)
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Location: Tôkyô, Japan
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I just had to butt in once more, Intel just released their new dual-core Xeons 'Paxville' and gamepc has a review out of them. They compare it to the new dual-core Opterons of course. It's a slaughter, see yourself:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...axville&page=1
Quote:
The Final Word
Intel’s “Paxville” Dual Core Xeon processors can provide a much needed performance boost in applications which are designed to take advantage of a lot of processors and run a lot of simultaneous threads. Namely, server and high-end workstation class applications. In applications which can fully make use of its abilities, these new Xeon processors can push some solid performance numbers and crunch through code fairly fast. The amount of processing power with two of these Xeons is pretty impressive; however, all this processing power does come at a cost.
Intel’s new dual-core Xeon consumes the most power of any processors we’ve seen to date, and also runs exceedingly hot, both negative qualities for a processor which is designed for the server space. In addition, the chip is also not compatible with older Socket-604 platforms, meaning you will have to drop an additional $400-$500 on a new dual-core Xeon compatible platform, which will be a painful purchase if you’ve already got a Socket-604 Xeon system up and running today, and want to upgrade to dual-core processor. In addition, as of today, there are no motherboards on the market available to purchase which will support these new processors, which certainly will put a damper on any prospective buyers.
The one platform we did have the chance to test with, Asus’s PVL-D, was certainly up to the quality and stability levels we would expect from a server-class Xeon platform. The board provides a lot of memory capacity and plenty of high-speed I/O options, and certainly is a compliment to Intel’s new dual-core Xeon design. This board is expected to star shipping in the next month in SCSI and non-SCSI variants. From all we’ve seen, Asus will likely be the first on the market with a Paxville ready solution; other manufacturers may trail by a few weeks. It’s hard to get really excited about a server motherboard, but it does its job quite well and we have no qualms with it.
Unfortunately, even a solid platform can’t help Intel’s performance numbers, as their new dual-core chips (while powerful in their own right) simply are bested across the board by AMD’s dual-core Opteron processors. Even worse, the Opterons typically perform much better while running at slower clock speeds and only having half the amount of on-die L2 cache to utilize. AMD’s chips also consume far less power and run quite a bit cooler, giving AMD an edge on nearly all fronts. AMD’s top of the line dual-core Opterons are quite a bit more expensive compared to the top of the line 2.8 GHz Dual Core Xeon (which will sell for ~$1,000 per CPU), putting it roughly on par with AMD’s Opteron 270 (2.0 GHz) processor. Even comparing the Opteron 270 to the Paxville Xeon 2.8 GHz, we still would opt for an AMD based solution.
While the chips themselves can push some impressive numbers in the right environments, we are seeing more “collateral damage” than we’re used to seeing from a new Intel product launch. To us, it looks like Intel pushed out their dual-core product in order to quell the movement towards AMD dual-core products. Unfortunately, a chip like “Paxville” isn’t enough to do it. Intel certainly has some tricks left in their bag, with codenames like Sossaman, Bensley, and Dempsey. Let’s hope they can get these out of the labs and on to store shelves sooner rather than later.
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