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Conclusion
Even though Socket F appears to have a lot of potential in store, the first Opterons that hook into it don't really seem to profit from that. The most positive conclusion we can draw is that the performance is roughly equal to that of Socket 940. Nevertheless, the migration to DDR2 memory does come with a number of advantages. DDR2 is becoming cheaper than its predecessor and consumes less power. However, the availability of registered DDR2 for servers is not as good as that of its normal desktop variant. In our pricewatch, at this moment only registered DDR2-400 is well available, having a price similar to registered DDR400 memory. The DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 versions of the server memory are rarer and more expensive, and are furthermore troubled with comparatively high latencies. Registered DDR2-800 is nowhere to be found in our price database.
Socket F does make a good investment for the future. For instance, it probably won't be a problem to put a quad core K8L into this socket, which is expected to arrive half way next year. Whoever is in the market for an Opteron server therefore does the right thing when choosing for Socket F instead of Socket 940, even though there is no direct performance advantage. AMD's new socket will nevertheless not be able to do much about the advance of the Intel Woodcrest. Keep an eye on Tweakers.net to find out how Intel's latest Xeon performs in this test.
Words of thanks
Tweakers.net would like to thank MSI for lending us the Socket F mainboard, A-Data for sponsoring the DDR2 server memory, Inge Janse for the English translation and of course ACM and moto-moi for their valiant efforts of building the system and executing the benchmarks.
Previous articles in this series:
27-7-2006: Sun UltraSparc T1 vs. AMD Opteron (Dutch)
19-4-2006: Xeon vs. Opteron, single- en dualcore (Dutch)
Socket F does make a good investment for the future. For instance, it probably won't be a problem to put a quad core K8L into this socket, which is expected to arrive half way next year. Whoever is in the market for an Opteron server therefore does the right thing when choosing for Socket F instead of Socket 940, even though there is no direct performance advantage. AMD's new socket will nevertheless not be able to do much about the advance of the Intel Woodcrest. Keep an eye on Tweakers.net to find out how Intel's latest Xeon performs in this test.
Words of thanksTweakers.net would like to thank MSI for lending us the Socket F mainboard, A-Data for sponsoring the DDR2 server memory, Inge Janse for the English translation and of course ACM and moto-moi for their valiant efforts of building the system and executing the benchmarks. Previous articles in this series: 27-7-2006: Sun UltraSparc T1 vs. AMD Opteron (Dutch) 19-4-2006: Xeon vs. Opteron, single- en dualcore (Dutch)
