Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Barcelona just was not up for a fight

I waited, and I waited.. Dell and AMD kept saying it will be here before Intel.. Barcelona is beomcing AMD verions of Intel Itanium...

Being so late and talking about VM and 16cores ect ect... but now nobody cares..

I final blow came today for me with this news from VMmark.

"Our partners at Dell have published the first VMmark results using the new AMD quad-core Barcelona processors. Both the 2-socket (8-core) R805 platform and the 4-socket (16-core) R905 platform have been tested. You can find all of the details on the VMmark results page. If you do the math, you will see that Dell achieved an excellent 1.8x throughput scaling from the 2-socket system to the 4-socket system. Another thing I'd like to point out is that some of the VMmark workloads utilized AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology to improve performance. VMware supports a wide range of virtualization techniques and is able to uniquely leverage both hardware and sofware virtualization technologies in order to provide optimal performance."

Intel (on Dell R900) 14.23@10 tiles
Amd (on Dell R905) 14.17@10 tiles

So who cares about " AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology to improve performance" when Intel is about the same speed with a product that has been on sale 6months before yours.

I was really hoping that AMD was going to lunch and be shipping Barcelona with 16cores before Intel.. but some where, somthing went wrong and their is an other Itanium running around looking for a home.

I will have to wait to see the final price with discounts from Dell on AMD/Intel... but with many customers and my sell already having Intel Xeon 7300 and know that we cant Vmotion to any AMD Opteron and back their is no point.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are several issues with your post.

The most notable is that Intel's score has since been withdrawn from the VMware website because "result used a configuration that was not fully disclosed and….thus violates VMmark publication requirements." http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results/withdrawn.html

This means that AMD's Barcelona is not just back on top and holding its virtualization performance leadership, its leading the benchmark by ~8% with a 19% lower processor power specification than Intel.

Second, if you are going to reference the Intel score as outperforming AMD, don't you think you should make note that the Intel configuration used a much more expensive and power hungry storage configuration? Seems only fair to me...

Lastly, VMmark 1.0 does not support features to fully support Rapid Virtualization Indexing. VMmark 1.1 will offer improved underlying technology for RVI at which point you'll see even greater performance benefits.

X said...

Thanks for the feedback