Server duel: Xeon Woodcrest vs. Opteron Socket F

Test platform: Socket F and the rest

The results of the Opteron with DDR2 that have been used in this review are the same as those that were used in an earlier article. They were obtained using a MSI K9SD Master A8R and two dualcore Socket F Opterons clocked at 2.4GHz. The board uses a Serverworks chipset and has a PCI Express x8 slot, a 133MHz PCI-X slot and a standard PCI slot. A fourth slot can be selected by the customer: depending one the riser card used, the fourth slot is either PCI Express x8 or an HTX connection (HyperTransport).

On board we find two times gigabit ethernet and eight times SATA (four of the Serverworks chipsets with support for RAID 0 and 1, and four Adaptec AIC-8130 sets supporting RAID 0, 1, and 10). An integrated ATi Radeon Mobility takes care of the imagery. However, it is especially the large number of memory slots, totalling sixteen, that makes this board stand out. Unfortunately, stability problems with our preproduction hardware made it impossible to put more than four modules to work. We ended up testing with only 4GB of RAM, less than the other systems had at their disposal. The few results that we managed to obtain with the 8GB Socket F system allow for the conclusion that performance loss due to the lower memory capacity was about two percent, which needs to be taken into consideration when reading the diagrams.

Beside the Socket F board we shall encounter the results of two other familiar faces in this article: the Sun X4200 and T2000 from our UltraSparc T1 vs. Opteron review. For completeness, we list all specifications below.

Merk	Intel	Intel	AMD	AMD	Sun
Processor	Xeon	Xeon	Opteron	Opteron	UltraSparc
Model	5080	5150	2216	280	T1
Code name	Dempsey	Woodcrest	Santa Rosa	Italy	Niagara
Architecture	Netburst	Core	K8	K8	Sparc
Clock speed	3.73GHz	2.66GHz	2.4GHz	2.4GHz	1.0GHz
Socket type	771 (J)	771 (J)	1207 (F)	940	1933
Bus	1066MHz	1333MHz	-	-	-
L2-cache	2x2MB	4MB	2x1MB	2x1MB	3MB
TDP	130W	65W	95W	95W	79W
Price	$851	$690	$698	$851	-
Server brand	Fujitsu	Fujitsu	MSI	Sun	Sun
Servertype	RX300 S3	RX300 S3	K9SD Master	Fire X4200	Fire T2000
Height	2U	2U	-	2U	2U
Number of sockets	2	2	2	2	1
Number of cores	4	4	4	4	8
Memory type	FBD	FBD	DDR2	DDR	DDR2
Channels	4	4	4	4	4
Frequency	533MHz	533MHz	667MHz	400MHz	533MHz
CAS (cycles)	4	4	5	3	4
CAS (nanoseconds)	7.5	7.5	7.5	7.5	7.5
Capacity	7GB	7GB	4GB	8GB	16GB
Operating system	Linux 2.6	Linux 2.6	Linux 2.6	Linux 2.6	Solaris 10
Storage controller	Areca	Areca	Areca	Areca	LSI
Type	ARC-1120	ARC-1120	ARC-1120	ARC-1120	SAS1064
Cache	128MB	128MB	128MB	128MB	-
Interface	PCI-X	PCI-X	PCI-X	PCI-X	PCI-X
Disks	Raptor 73GB	Raptor 73GB	Raptor 73GB	Raptor 73GB	SAS 73GB
Number of disks	2	2	2	2	2
RAID	JBOD	JBOD	JBOD	JBOD	JBOD

• Volgende pagina 9. Benchmark description