Manufacturers use Intel compilers to make AMD Opterons fly
All the tricks in and out of the book
By INQUIRER staff: Monday 28 April 2003, 09:32
SYSTEM INTEGRATORS making Opteron boxes to sell against Intel Xeons are using every trick in the book to improve performance, it has emerged. And one such system integrator has revealed to us a cunning plan that speeds up performance of what AMD hopes is a Xeon-killer and Intel hopes is just a flash in the pan.
One integrator told the INQ today: "The Intel compilers are by far the best for optimising X86 but of course do not recognise an AMD Opteron."
He continued: "The Opteron has SSE2 support, but to get a binary calling SSE2 one has to compile the binary on a Xeon machine. Move the binary over to the Opteron box and it flies." Further - the integrator, who sells Intel server machines too, he claimed that the SMP performance is excellent on the Opteron platform. He said: "Typical SMP benchmarks in HPC show about a 30% gain with 2 CPUs over one on a Xeon/P4 platform. The same tests on Opteron show an 80% gain". µ
* Meanwhile, an article by microprocessor maven Andreas Stiller at c't magazine in Germany has released performance figures that appear to show that the 32-way NEC Express 5800, a 32-way Itanium system, seriously underperforms the 32-way Hewlett Packard GS1280, the latter using the Alpha microprocessor, currently in its death agonies. You can find that here, and you should also click on the "SAP-SD-Benchmark-Werten" link.
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