Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pgerassi]

Dear Chipguy:

Why do you use SPECbase instead of SPECpeak? Is it because Intel CPUs look better that way? Well for most CPUs we use SPECpeak. Using SPECint_peak, Opteron 148 beats Itanium2 1.5/6MB, 1477 to 1404. And that's with an older generation compiler, icc7.0. Given the boost using icc8.0 over icc7.0 given to same Xeons speeds and caches, Opteron 148 would get about 1750. Using the older compiler, AFX 53/940 would get over 1600. Using both, AFX 53/940 should get over 1900. When AFX 53/939 appears and with DDR500, that should be over 2000.

Itanium2 1.7/9 probably would get to 1580, far below even icc 7.0, AFX 53/940 or Opteron 150.

So your answer is that Opteron is faster than it tests and Itanium2 is slower than it tests. Itanium is very cache dependent. Opteron is not as the A64 512K vs A64 1M comparisons have found. 1/2 the cache hits A64 by less than 3% overall. It hits Itanium2 about 5.5% and a 1/4 cache hits about 18% in SPECint. SPECfp hits about 1.5% and 19% respectively (Evidently 3MB is almost enough for I2 in SPECfp).

Pete

Current K9 speculations have it adding additional FPmult and FPadd units to boost packed SSE2 performance doubling FPC (Flops per cycle) performance. Montecito may lose both SPECint and SPECfp.