m3

The best way to evaluate computer performance is to use benchmarking software. The following is an example of a benchmark comparison between two workstation systems.

Cinebench 11 and 10 respectively 

Higher is better

•  x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650

• 14.72
• 
  14.43

0

3

5.5

8

10.5

13

15.5

• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
• Intel Core i7-930

• 32724
• 28980
• 25881
• 25595
• 24864
• 24299
• 23445
• 18563
• 17009

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

Lightwave 9.6

Lower is better

• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775

• 66
• 68
• 85
• 86
• 89
• 91
• 91

0

25

50

75

100

• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382

• 6.55
• 8.43
• 10.01
• 10.20
• 10.52
• 12.55
• 13.23

0

3

5.5

8

10.5

13

Euler3D

Higher is better

• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382

• 8.903
• 6.897
• 4.005
• 3.705
• 3.568
• 3.502
• 2.780

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

FlamMap

Lower is better

• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382

• 119
• 130
• 142
• 177
• 220
• 226
• 310

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

WPrime32M

Lower is better

• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2435
• Core i7-980X Extreme Edition
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482
• 2 x Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775
• 2 x AMD Opteron 2382
• Core i7-930

• 3.824
• 4.135
• 4.329
• 5.265
• 5.287
• 5.723
• 6.265
• 7.376
• 8.736

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Folding@home

Higher is better

• 2 x AMD Opteron 6174
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5650
• 2 x Intel Xeon W5580
• 2 x Intel Xeon X5482

• 62792
• 62102
• 43594
• 26564

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

All benchmarks were taken from http://www.bit-tech.net/, 

As you can see, in most tests the Xeon's (model bellow the one in my system) beats two Opteron's. The xeon machine beats the Opteron in five of 8 benchmarks, however the benchmarks the Opterons win are heavily multithreaded tasks such as http://folding.stanford.edu/ andWPrime. While the Opteron system has 4 CPU's, most workstaton applications don't really support that many cores, however in cases where they can, the Opterons beat the dual Xeon's hands down. Since the opteron system has 4 CPU's it's scores will be better than in these benchmarks since only two were used, however you must keep in mind scaling and twice the processors will not equal twice the performance.

In most cases, the 48GB of memory in the SR-2 Xeon rig is plenty, however for really extreme rendering and calculations more may be needed, this is another time when the AMD system will be better. However the Opteron system does not support any kind of overclocking and only runs slower DDR3 (1333MHz VS. 2000MHz).

In conclusion neither machine is better than the over overall, if you are doing tasks which won't use the cores the Opeteron system has and you need a faster chip overall, you should go with the Xeon based system. However, if you are running software that won't use all 48 cores you will find the xeon machine faster.