Hands on with Production Dual-Core AMD Opteron April 20, 2005

Introduction

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CPUs have been on their “last legs” many times. There was once talk of the CPU outclassing the motherboard, memory, and peripheral bus – where components such as RAM or SCSI controllers simply could not deal with the high bus-speeds of the CPU. Moore’s Law was supposed to be doomed with CPUs no longer being able to improve, and lo and behold, the concept of clock multipliers was introduced with the 486 DX2/66. Imagine a world where we didn’t have clock multipliers and you were trying to run your soundcard on a bus speed of several gigahertz!

Well, most recently, there has been talk of CPUs drawing too much power, dissipating too much heat, and that improvements in fabrication weren’t progressing fast enough to allow CPUs to continue to grow at their current rate. The CPU industry was supposedly on its last legs again. Yet the solution to this problem was found in multi-core processor technology where multiple CPUs could be integrated into a single physical chip. In 10 years, we will all look at the introduction of multi-core CPUs to the mainstream to be as meaningful and significant as the invention of the clock multiplier – that is to say, one day we will all think that multi-core processors were how modern CPUs have always been.

The first dual core CPU on the market was IBM’s Power4 chip in 2001, but this was reserved for true enterprise grade servers and sites willing to shell out over a half a million dollars for a single server: by Christmas 2005, many gamers and PC enthusiasts will likely own a dual core CPU.

Today, we’ll be looking at AMD’s multi-core technology, the latest manufacturer to enter the multi-core world. Officially, in today’s announcement AMD’s dual core technology is limited to Socket 940 Opteron CPUs, however it doesn’t take any effort to predict that this technology will trickle down to the Athlon64 line in the future – AMD readily confirms that desktop dual core processors are on their way late in the 2nd quarter.




SIDEBAR: What would a dual processor article be without a reference to a Double-Double from In-N-Out?

Who Needs Two Processors?

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The benefits of having multiple processors for non-gaming apps such as media and content creation are obvious. Digital photography programs such as Photoshop, Capture One DSLR, Bibble, and Noise Ninja are all written to take advantage of multiple CPUs. The same is true with scientific computing applications such as LS-DYNA, and most video NLE and compositing software also are multi-processor capable. After all, it is these kinds of software applications that have driven the market for high-end systems in the past.

However, a fair question is what multiple processors can offer for the rest of us who may simply play games and do “normal computer stuff.” Well one of the benefits of today’s modern operating system is that it’s all multithreaded. So, while doubling performance in a single application using a second CPU requires dedicated software support, improving your overall system performance with additional CPUs when running multiple applications simultaneously happens automatically. The classic best-case-scenario marketing examples are things like encoding a MP3 or DVD in the background while playing games. However, the benefits of multiple processors are still present in the day-to-day experience. As any owner of a dual processor can confirm, Windows itself is just a little bit faster since there’s always a “free” CPU ready to deal with your user input and clicks. Is it a sign of bloated software that you need dual processors to get the maximum responsiveness in a GUI? Probably, but if you need to run Windows XP, the point about efficiency is moot – dual CPUs are still faster.

What about Games?

The traditional teaching has always been that games don’t benefit from multiple processors. There are a number of reasons for this “was true but not for long” statement. One of the main reasons was that until Windows 2000, dual-processor systems required Windows NT, which could not support DirectX gaming. Not only that, since historically motherboards requiring dual processors were engineered for mission-critical stability, they often required slower, but more reliable registered ECC RAM resulting in poorer performance. Third, games have traditionally been single-threaded applications where the second CPU offered no performance advantage on benchmarks. Finally, the original Sound Blaster Live, the standard gaming sound card when dual CPUs first became affordable, had very unstable drivers in SMP setups.

Under traditional benchmark settings, reviewers use a clean install with minimal applications. This helps us produce the most consistent numbers for evaluating different hardware and maximizes the performance of a single CPU system. However, in real-life, when you’re playing a game, your CPU still needs to spend time managing memory, the swap file, while keeping your real-time anti-virus file scanner and firewall active. Everyone claims to run a clean system, but how many of us have been dropped out of a LAN game because we received an instant message? How many of you have a torrent downloading in the background while you game?

Production systems (i.e. PCs with lots of stuff installed on it) can benefit more from multiple processors than the numbers from a clean benchmark might suggest. Even the most fervent marketing manager wouldn't claim that dual processors are an ideal match for current games, but to say that there is no advantage would be a mistake. With equal clockspeeds, I'd still take the dual processor over the single processor. Of course, clockspeeds aren't always equal and so for now, a single-core Athlon FX with a higher-clock speed will still outperform a slower dual-core Opteron for games.

I said that dual processors being bad for games a long time ago was true, but not for long. Why is that so? Well a few reasons. Whereas Windows NT and, to a lesser extent, 2000 weren’t the best platforms for gaming, Windows XP Professional supports two physical CPUs just fine. Corsair produces a ultra-low latency CAS 2-3-2-6 registered DDR module for anyone looking for the absolute pinnacle of registered ECC DDR, and from the chipset standpoint, whereas dual processor chipsets used to come from the CPU manufacturer of the likes of ServerWorks, NVIDIA is now in the market, producing chipsets such as the nForce Professional that offer the same multimedia and graphics capabilities as flagship consumer motherboards including dual x16 PCI Express slots for SLI gaming.

The other reason why multi-core will make a difference in the future is that the games of tomorrow are going to be multi-threaded and multi-core capable. We can thank Microsoft and Sony for that.

With the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation 3, software developers around the world will begin to adopt programming styles and approaches that take advantage of multi-core programming. In fact, this was part of the PlayStation 2 development strength/frustration. Ask any multiplatform game developer what he thinks of the PS2 development environment and he’ll complain about poor documentation and poor integration between the vector units and CPU and GPU. The PlayStation 2’s non-traditional parallel architecture means that extra work is required. However, consider games like Metal Gear Solid 3 or Gran Turismo 4 and you can see where strengths of going with parallelism lie. It’s easier to make faster hardware. The Game Developer Conference where the PlayStation 2 launched was also the same conference where NVIDIA had their TNT2 on display.

In the next year, more and more games will be developed with multi-core CPUs in mind. Initially it’ll be the console world that benefits, but this will crossover into the PC world very quickly, and in a few years, it will be the single-threaded games that will be the odd products out. I’d bet that it’d also be this time when dual core desktop CPUs become affordable.


SIDEBAR: Not every application supporting two CPUs will take advantage of the 3rd and 4th CPU core.

Opteron versus Xeon

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In AMD’s case, the memory controller is tied to each physical processor. The two cores of a multi-core CPU are connected with AMD’s “Direct Connect Technology,” marketing talk for having two CPU cores with direct on-die access to the shared on-die memory controller.

In comparison to a dedicated dual Opteron system, a single dual-core Opteron has half the memory bandwidth but less latency. However, that’s the pessimistic way to look at it – a single dual core Opteron has the same memory bandwidth as one single-core Opteron, but has twice the computational units… and while I said a pair of single-core Opterons should outperform a single dual-core Opteron, a pair of dual core Opterons will be even more impressive.

At today’s launch AMD has three platforms, the Opteron x65, the x70, and x75 where the x is 1, 2, or 8 depending on whether or not the chip supports 1, 2, or more CPUs. The x65 is a dual-core 1.8GHz (i.e. two Opteron x44’s), the x70 is a dual-core 2.0 GHz (i.e. two Opteron 246’s), and the x75 is a dual-core 2.2GHz (i.e. two Opteron 248’s). The fastest clocked Opteron is the 252, which runs at 2.6GHz.

The Competition?

Intel’s dual-core approach is still built on top of Intel’s current design philosophy in which the memory controller is still part of the motherboard rather than the CPU. Likewise, instead of something such as HyperTransport, the interconnect between the two CPUs is also similar to a traditional Xeon architecture meaning that the processors don’t have as much bandwidth. Moreover, the current dual core processors from Intel only have a FSB of 800MHz as opposed to the fast 1066MHz FSB of the single-core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. Dual-core Pentium processors will require new motherboards and chipsets but in theory, AMD dual-core CPUs should be compatible with today’s chipsets and motherboards.

Talking with system builders however, the biggest difference that is often forgotten is the 16GB memory limit. Both Intel and AMD servers claim to support 16GB of system RAM through the use of 2GB DIMMS. Unfortunately, 2GB DDR-2 DIMMS compatible with Intel servers are exceptionally difficult to find, with few manufacturers even willing to make them. So, the difference in cost for RAM for a 16GB system can be as much as $10,000 per server! Fortunately for Intel, most end-users don’t need 16GB of RAM.

Pricing

For the current dual-core processor launch, AMD is focusing their dual core technology on the high-end with Socket 940 Opterons. From a business perspective this makes sense since early on, it will be the typical Opteron user who will want dual-core CPUs first and many of these new customers will be looking to get two dual-core processors rather than just one. In a way, AMD now has the potential of selling the equivalent of 4 CPU cores per physical system. Not a bad deal for them.

As for the typical consumer, two CPU cores will be enough and so we’ll still need to wait for the Athlon64 dual-core processors to hit the market in June. Even then, they will start early on at premium pricing (along the lines of the Athlon FX line) but by the holiday shopping season, dual-core processors should be more accessible to the mainstream performance buyer.



SIDEBAR: Intel platforms will continue to get better now that NVIDIA is on-board.

Introduction to testing

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Of course, that’s the beauty of the Internet and the free-access to review websites – you can always read reviews from multiple sources and even today, FiringSquad has two completely independent writers covering the same product (Chris’s review is coming later today).

Synthetic Tests

We use SiSoft Sandra Professional for our synthetic tests. These tests are probably best representative of system performance when you’re developing customized software. That is to say, while these tests won’t be useful to the average end user, they are probably the most predictive for all those aerospace and semiconductor companies who need all the compute power they can get their hands on.

Scientific Computing

My scientific computing tests involve two applications: MATLAB and LS-DYNA.

MATLAB Release 14

MATLAB is your basic multipurpose scientific computing application. Every engineer and his brother have used Matlab at one point or another. It's a very flexible application used in high school to teach basic Newtonian physics and was used in industry to design the Joint Strike Fighter. It used to be said that Matlab was single-threaded because for most tasks, a lot of computation time is spent processing the script, something that isn't parallel at all. Parsing scripts isn't a very glamorous aspect of scientific computing, but it's very important to real-world use. Think of the car that does 0-60 in 4 seconds but requires you to refill the gas tank every 10 miles. There's no doubt that the car is fast, but no one would really use it. Well, starting with Release 14 of Matlab, multithreaded support is included through the use of the Intel Math Kernel Library. Although this library is optimized for Intel processors, it works with AMD CPUs too. AMD’s own optimized math performance library exists for Linux, where most of the applications lie, but they’ll have a Win32 version compatible with Matlab in the future.

To measure real-world performance, I'll be using a lengthy script from our lab which I used in the 2003 article, still codenamed as N72. Since it is about two years later, I can tell you more about the script. N72 really stands for Number 72. The specifics remain proprietary but data from an MRI of the heart is read into memory and the 3D geometry of the heart is processed out and then the positions of myocytes are determined. The whole thing requires the system to have a GB of system RAM. This script represents a real-world example of reading in raw data and then processing it to get the meaningful data. Obviously different fields of science have different tasks and different tasks will perform differently on different architectures.

It's obviously not designed to be a comprehensive Matlab performance benchmark, but it's a real-world test that has a realistic balance of true computation and script parsing performance. This is something that I feel is missing from ScienceMark. ScienceMark is better at representing the back-end calculation rather than the actual performance measures that affect user-input and response.

LS-DYNA Release 970

LS-DYNA is a general purpose transient finite element solver capable of simulating complex real-world problems. That’s the party line at least. Essentially, it’s software that lets you simulate all sorts of things. Automakers use it to developer safer cars by simulating crash tests, the military uses it to simulate weapons explosions, and scientists can use it to study biomechanics. I will bench the CPUs using two classic tests, a 3-vehicle collision and a single front-collision. The 3-vehicle collision takes more than 24 hours to complete – we do not have these numbers ready for this round of articles.


SIDEBAR: Synthetic benchmarks are still helpful to make sure your system isn’t broken.

Intro to photography testing

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With 1GB memory cards exceptionally affordable, digital photographers can take hundreds to thousands of pictures a day. With digital SLRs, photographers aren't taking JPEGs but instead are capturing RAW images containing all of the data at the time of the shot. With regular workloads from a few hundred to a few thousand images, even small differences in performance can make a big difference in the long run. Moreover, unlike 3D rendering applications where you can let it sit and an animation is a month-long project, photographers often need the end results right away so they can proof it, edit the images, and sell the images.

In addition, when it comes to 3D content creation, most of it is user-limited during the day (the CPU is idle when the artist is thinking about what he wants to draw). In the evening it's an overnight render of animation, which essentially means that if the render starts at the end of the workday, it just needs to be ready before the beginning of the workday the following day - it doesn't matter if it finishes at midnight or 15 minutes before the workday starts.

With increasing megapixel counts, cheaper flash cards, and more and more consumers able to afford cameras supporting the RAW file format, I cannot imagine a better genre to evaluate the CPUs of tomorrow.

Our digital photography benchmarking suite now consists of three applications, all worthwhile to check out (they all have free trial versions).

Capture One D-SLR 3.7 RC1

(http://www.rawworkflow.com)
Although RAW processing software from the competition has improved significantly, Capture One continues to be the one of the most popular high-end RAW processors on the market. This time, I will be evaluating RAW processing performance with 6 different cameras
1. Canon EOS-20D (8.2 megapixels)
2. Canon EOS 1D Mark II (8.2 megapixels)
3. Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II (16.7 megapixels)
4. Nikon D2H (4.1 megapixels)
5. Nikon D2X (12.4 megapixels)
6. Phase One P25 (22 megapixels)

Bibble Pro 4.2.2

(http://www.bibblelabs.com)
Bibble 4 was the epitome of vaporware for some point. But before we can talk about Version 4, we have to talk about Version 3. Bibble was one of the original 3rd party RAW developers, engineered by a Nikon shooter with a strong programming background. From the very beginning, Bibble offered the best detail, color, and performance of any RAW processor. The catch was that Bibble support was Nikon-centric (understandably so given the author’s penchant). Beta Canon support was introduced in the later versions of Bibble 3.0, but it was buggy. The author of Bibble promised to include Canon support in the “next version” of Bibble, but this next version was going to take longer because it was going to be a complete rewrite.

So began the two-year wait for Bibble 4.0.
Bibble had support for multiple processors early on, and the programmer is an enthusiast himself who dedicates much of the time hand-optimizing the code.

We will likely consider benchmarking additional RAW processors in the future.

Noise Ninja 2

(http://www.picturecode.com)
Although today’s digital SLRs offer incredibly high-ISO and low-light performance, there continues to be a role for noise removal software as people start moving from trying to shoot under ISO400 to trying to shoot under ISO 1600. In our original set of digital photography benchmarks, I relied on NeatImage one of the most popular noise removal tools available at the time. Since then, I’ve decided to standardize on Noise Ninja 2 for a few reasons. While NeatImage is still great, as the basic version is distributed as freeware, and I highly recommend it, Noise Ninja 2 has become more of the professional’s choice thanks to its improved workflow and faster performance. That is to say that Neat Image does a great job when you’ve got the time to fine-tune your images, but Noise Ninja 2 is clearly the better choice when you’re dealing with huge amounts of images and want the best automated noise filter. From a strict benchmarking perspective, the ability to select the number of threads used is also helpful. In this test, we just measure the performance of filtering out an ISO 800 JPEG from a Canon EOS-20D.

We unfortunately did not have time to include Adobe Photoshop CS testing in this article.

Digital Video Tests

Working with digital video is also an area that has gain much interest in recent years thanks to the convenience of DV and HDV format camcorders. Due to time constraints, we only had an opportunity to test two applications.

Adobe After Effects 6.5 Pro Bundle

Adobe After Effects is a compositing tool similar to discreet Combustion or Apple Motion. In our test, we’ve gone with a standard publicly available benchmark project starting with a generated fractal sequence and using that in a multi-layer composition.

Canopus ProCoder 2.0

Our video encoding tests were done with Canopus ProCoder 2.0. We ran two different tests. The first test was a torture test converting a 1440x1080p WMV-HD clip into a 24MBps 1920x1080p MPEG-2 file. This is a stress test for the system as real-time decoding of WMV-HD clips in real time already requires a 3GHz class CPU. Since the WMV decoding isn’t optimized for multiple processors, we also ran a second test that converted an uncompressed 1440x1080p AVI to a 24MBps 1920x1080p MPEG-2 file.

We hope to add TMPGEnc Xpress 3.0 as an additional video processor in the near future.

Test Setup

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Colfax are the guys you turn to when you want that Quad Opteron 852 with 32GB of System RAM and 16 terabytes of HDD space in a RAID 5 configuration with a 1.3kW PSU (about $40k). Not only can you buy that system, but you’ll have the comfort of knowing that they’ve built that type of system before. While I was there, they were building dozens of rackmounted systems for customers demanding the full 16GB of memory.

One of the odd things that has happened as a result of building high-end servers and workstations for close to 20 years is that they’ve never needed to have a huge on-site service team. Yet, if you think about it, it makes sense –people who buy super-servers fall into two categories. There are people who are simply throwing hardware at a problem and need all of the handholding they can get, and then there are the academic and defense guys who need these systems to run exotic custom software, or even run classified custom-built PCI cards where any computer problems won’t be helped by GeekSquad.

Anyhow, they build high-performance desktops too. They bridge the gap between the power users who would rather not pay for the handholding of the full-service guys, but don’t want to build a system due to time constraints or those who prefer the convenience of having a system ready to go.

Probably most importantly, they’re actually one of the few retailers who have a large allotment of Dual Core AMD Opterons at launch, so if you’re in the market for one, they’ll definitely be a good source to find such systems.

System Specs

The Dual Opteron 875 (2.2 GHz x 2 x 2) machine was furnished by Colfax International. It features Tyan’s new flagship Thunder K8WE, an NVIDIA nForce Professional based motherboard. They use ThermalTake coolers, 4GB of ATP DDR400 RAM, and a Chenbro SR107 chassis with an Enhance 550W EPS12V power supply. Since they run at the same clock speed, the 875s should perform identically to the Opteron 275, only the 875 can be used in 8-way servers whereas 275s are limited to dual processor configurations only.

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SiSoft Sandra Professional 2005

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Dhrystone ALU (higher is better)

No surprises here. When it comes to integer performance, the Opteron’s are incredible. It’s amazing that Intel’s Dual-Core Pentium EE 840, a desktop processor, is about on par with our “ultimate” workstation setup from about 2 years ago.

Whetstone FPU (higher is better)

Intel CPUs always do well here, although it’s odd that real-world experiences always seem to put AMD ahead in the FPU arena. Still, for customized non-SIMD software the Pentium lineup is a strong contender.

Integer SSE2 (higher is better)

Floating Point SSE2 (higher is better)

Most of today’s advanced scientific computing platforms use SSE for calculations. Intel has traditionally held the advantage when it comes to SSE processing, but the newer Opteron steppings provide a strong showing. Again, it is impressive to see how well Intel does, but the flagship performance is with the 2x Dual-Core Opteron 275’s.

Matlab N72 – Time to completion (shorter is better)

It seems like Mathwork’s original claim that most Matlab scripts are limited by the parsing of the script is true. Here, the added clockspeed of the Opteron 252’s push it to the very top. Though the script includes a moderate amount of matrix math, it doesn’t seem like much of it is parallelized. Our recommendation from two years ago still stands – for most Matlab users, the fastest performance will come with a single Athlon64 line. We hope to follow-up in the future with additional Matlab tests once AMD’s own Math Core Libraries are available. We did not have time to evaluate the Intel platform with the Intel MKL, the P4 3.0GHz is an older reference measurement.

Capture One D-SLR 3.7 Release Candidate 1

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Although Capture One is an industry standard program used by professionals with medium format digital camera backs in the 5 digit price range, we were surprised to see that Capture One is only capable of processing to 2 threads. This means that on a 2x Dual-Core Opteron system, only one of the Dual Core CPUs is in use.

Time to Process a Canon EOS-20D CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Canon EOS 1D Mark II CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Nikon D2H NEF (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Nikon D2X NEF (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Phase One P25 RAW image (shorter is better)

With Capture One only supporting two CPU threads, the dual-core Opteron’s lower clockspeed is a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the AMD Opteron platform remains a strong Capture One platform on the market. Digital photographers looking for the best bang-for-the-buck performance in Capture One should consider a system with one Dual-Core Opteron 275. With 4 logical processors being more common in the future, we anticipate that Capture One will quickly include support for 4 processors (despite their tardiness in supporting the EOS-20D). This doesn’t require a complete rewrite of the processing engine – all Phase One needs to do is to allow the batch to process multiple files. Each dual-core CPU can focus its attention on different images.



SIDEBAR: Pixmantic RawShooter Essentials is developed by an ex-developer of Capture One. It’s free and very good, but only supports 1 CPU at the moment.

Bibble 4.2.2 Numbers

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The $500 Capture One Pro only supported 2 CPUs, but the one-man team of Bibble Labs and their $129 Bibble Pro 3 OS license: Windows, Linux, and OSX supported all 4 processors. When I saw the performance of the new 2x Dual Core AMD Opterons, I did not believe it. I checked to make sure I wasn’t caching something and making sure Bibble wasn’t processing the background. The dual Dual-Core AMD Opteron was so fast on this test that I repeated the test five times to make sure something wasn’t amiss. Turns out, it really was that fast.

All images were converted using a “normal contrast” preset with no noise reduction.

Time to Process a Canon EOS-20D CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II CR2 (shorter is better)

Time to Process a Nikon D2X NEF (shorter is better)

Even though I had checked these number five times, these numbers still seemed too fast to be fathomable, so I took a separate brand-new set of 1GB of 20D RAW images and let Bibble batch process them.

Time to Process 1 gigabyte of Canon EOS-20D CR2 images (shorter is better)

It took only 4 minutes to complete with the 2x Dual Core Opteron 275. 4 minutes! That’s 4.2MB/sec of processing time – a 2x Dual-Core Opteron 275 can process RAW images about as fast as it takes to copy them from to your computer using a standard-grade USB 2.0 CF card reader!

Digital SLR photographers have often asked for a “RAW processor” in PCI-Express hardware to speed things up. It seems like the solution is already here in the form of 2x Dual Core Opteron 275’s and Bibble 4.2. The added bonus is that instead of having a RAW processor hardware PCI-Express add-on, this extra CPU performance will speed everything up no matter which camera manufacturer and with other apps including Photoshop CS.



SIDEBAR: Bibble is named for the author’s cat.

Noise Ninja 2.0

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One of the great things about Noise Ninja is that it’s noise-removing algorithm is designed for multiprocessor systems. While other software such as Neat Image support multiprocessor systems, all they’re really doing is running multiple files simultaneously. That is, with Noise Ninja, all CPUs are used when cleaning an image. With NeatImage, each CPU focuses on its own image.

Time to Process an ISO 800 Canon EOS-20D – 8 threads (shorter is better)

Time to Process an ISO 800 Canon EOS-20D – 4 threads (shorter is better)

Time to Process an ISO 800 Canon EOS-20D – 2 threads (shorter is better)

Time to Process an ISO 800 Canon EOS-20D – 1 thread (shorter is better)

It’s interesting to see how the different threads affect different CPUs. On the slower Opteron 246, the fastest results were had with 4 threads, but on the faster CPUs, 8 threads was better.


SIDEBAR: What could possibly be cooler than ninjas?

After Effects 6.5

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We did not have much time to test After Effects using our own in-house compositions, but we did run a simple AE Total Benchmark Test.

Comp 1 – Fractal Generation (shorter is better)

Comp 2 – Multi-layer compositing (shorter is better)

Although the 2x Opteron 252’s hold their ground on pure computation, when it comes to complex multilayer compositing, the newer Dual-Core Opterons are the fastest solution. Still, the differences were not as prominent as that with Bibble.

Canopus Procoder 2.0

We used a 21 second clip.

1440x1080p WMV-HD to 1920x1080p 24MBps MPEG-2 (shorter is better)

1440x1080p uncompressed HD to 1920x1080p 24MBps MPEG-2 (shorter is better)

Since the decoding of WMV-HD does not seem to take advantage of both CPUs, the performance gain from the Dual-Core AMD Opterons is virtually absent. That 1 sec difference is not likely to be statistically significant.

On the other hand in terms of strict MPEG-2 encoding performance, the new Dual Core Opterons are faster, but not by that much.

Conclusion

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So who should get a Dual-Core CPU? Well, if you read the article, you’d know that the answer is everyone – by the end of the year, when things move from the workstation to the home desktop. How about right now? Well, people who’ve always looked to dual processor machines (IT infrastructure, custom software, digital media) should strongly consider these new systems. Professional photographers who regular work with hundreds to thousands of images a day with cameras such as the 1Ds or 1D Mark II from should strongly consider getting a Dual Opteron system as their next upgrade. It truly is the “hardware accelerated RAW processor” that many have dreamed of.

Where can I get one?

Although the Dual-Core Opterons were just announced today, the Dual-Core Opterons are actually shipping today. They are in relatively limited supply though. That said, Colfax does have one of the larger allotments of Dual-Core Opteron systems ready to ship, ranging from basic single Dual-Core Opteron systems to the full dual Dual-Core Opterons. You can browse their workstation system configurations online here and take a look at the launch day server offerings here.

For the rest of you looking to build a 2x Dual-Core Opteron system on your own, stay tuned.