Workstation CPUs

People buying flagship Opterons often spend the big bucks, knowing that the added performance will pay for itself by letting you do business faster. For example, a month ago, I was the second photographer at a noon wedding ceremony that ended at 3 PM. I had 6GB of RAW images. Thanks to a dual Opteron 252 system and high-speed CF cards from Corsair, I was able to process all of those images using Bibble, screen out the 100 best shots, put them in a fully animated slideshow with the pan-and-zoom “Ken Burns” effect (not one static frame), encode it to a MPEG-2 DVD, and have it ready for viewing at the 5 PM reception. So while it’s true that a pair of Opteron 252’s sets you back close to 2 grand, the ability for me to have an evening DVD slideshow of the morning’s events could be net enough future customers that it will pay for itself.

Initially, for the workstation my thought was to drop down to the Opteron 246’s since the 2GHz CPUs are a relative bargain at $333 each.

However, the Athlon64 X2 changes things up a bit. An Athlon64 X2 4200+ running dual 2.2GHz CPUs with 512 kb L2 cache is probably on par with the performance of a pair of Opteron 246’s when it comes to traditional media and digital image applications (where the L2 cache will play a smaller role). The “disadvantage” of the X2 is that it will not support things like ECC Chip Kill – but this also reflects a price advantage since conventional DDR-RAM and single-socket nForce4 Socket 939 motherboards can be used.

When would you use Intel?

With all of our systems in this article running AMD, some of you might think that we’re biased against Intel. That’s not true, I’m typing this article on a Pentium M right now. Let’s take a look at what has changed. Two years ago, in our system building article we had dual Opterons as the flagship performing systems, but we turned to the Pentium 4 3.0GHz for our storage server. Back then, we saw the Tyan Trinity motherboard running the i875P as a true reflection of Intel’s superiority over AMD when it came to infrastructure. Intel had the CSA bus for their GigE and integrated Serial ATA whereas the Via K8T800 and AMD-9000 series products weren’t nearly as robust, and NVIDIA nForce3 wasn’t readily available. In 2005, things have changed. Intel needed to turn to NVIDIA for SLI support. The platform division from NVIDIA that had its roots in the pre-Riva 128 NV2 era is now the chipset design team to beat. They’re not the best at everything, but they make the best decisions about compromises.

With the infrastructure issue moot (we’d be going with “nForce4 SLI for Intel”), the battle between Intel and AMD is now strictly at the CPU level. Intel’s Netburst architecture is starting or has already faltered depending on how pessimistic you are, whereas AMD’s K8 architecture is just only beginning to blossom. The AMD platform provides better performance at the high-end, better performance at the low-end, has integrated memory controllers, and at this snapshot in time, it’s hard not to recommend the AMD as the CPU platform of choice.

But present performance won’t predict future performance. AMD’s early success with the K7 architecture, with the first to 1 GHz win proved to be a short lived victory. When the Athlon XP platform stopped progressing and Athlon64 platform was not yet out, the clear gaming choice would have been the Pentium 4. The industry doesn’t stop – you can be sure that Intel has spent years on the drawing board, drafting up the successor to NetBurst. We’ve already gotten a taste of that with the Pentium M. Likewise AMD has its own team on the K9 architecture. A great battle between AMD and Intel lies ahead, but for 2005 it’s AMD who’s enjoying their spot as number one.