A couple of days ago we were alerted to what we were told was a Shanghai SAP Score for an eight-socket machine, which looked to come in a full 30 per cent lower than the highest score, which incidentally seemed to be Intel’s Dunington. Just from looking at the numbers,AMD's Shanghai scores 7010 and Intel's Dunington. Hmmm…we’ll let our readers decide who alerted us to the results. We were assured this was an oranges vs oranges comparison, demonstrating that AMD’s Shanghai was being utterly trounced by Penryn on most benchmarks, and suggesting that the upcoming Nehalem would go even further and virtually obliterate it. All well and good, except, there’s a lot more to it than that. For starters, it’s not really a raw power end-game being played. Power consumption is also an important factor to be taken into consideration, because when most chips are deployed, they often only really run at somewhere between 12 and 20 per cent of their capacity. Secondly, what the SAP benchmark shows is an IBM database vs others, not chip to chip. When you look at the SAP SD two-Tier scores, the Dunnington score is one for an IBM System x3950 M2, 8 Processors / 48 Cores / 48 Threads, Intel Xeon Processor MP X7460 running IBM DB2 database. The Shanghai score posted is an HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8 Processors / 32 Cores / 32 Threads, Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor 8384, 2.7 GHz running Oracle 10g. Or in other words, a Shanghai system with 32 cores running Oracle is being compared to a Dunnington processor with 48 cores with IBM DB2. As AMD’s Phil Hughes put it to us, “This would be like trying to equate the scores from two different gaming performance benchmarks.”
AMD also argued that the Dunnington score demonstrated highest power consumption X7460 (130W TDP), while the Shanghai score was for its mainstream 8384 (75W ACP). This brings us to another problem, because AMD is basically claiming that its ACP rating is equivalent to Intel's TDP rating. There’s been a fair amount of controversy over this, and plenty of evidence that comparing the two is problematic. Based on that evidence, it would appear AMD’s ACP rating goes some way to overstate the energy efficiency of its processors.
( www.theinquirer.net )
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