Benchmarks show dual-core Opteron trouncing expensive Xeon

A NOODLE AROUND some published benchmarks suggests AMD's new dual-core Opterons fare pretty well against Intel's Xeons.

An eagle-eyed reader pointed us at some HP SAP benchmarks here in which a four-chip, eight-core HP ProLiant DL585 supported "1,772 SAP SD Benchmark users and fully processed 178,000 order line items per hour".

Searching around for some comparable tests, our correspondent landed upon some benchmarks here for a 16-way 3GHz Xeon system.

Accordingly, a Unisys ES7000 Model Orion 540, 16-way SMP, Intel Xeon MP 3GHz, 20 KB L1 cache with 512KB L2 cache 4MB L3 cache achieves a SAP benchmark score of "1,400 users, 141670 items per hour".

He concludes that the DL585 with four Opteron 875s is 20 per cent faster than the 16P Xeon 3G/4MB. And, as he points out, these huge cache Xeons are very expensive - around $3900 a piece. µ

* Anandtech has a Dual Opteron 875 beating the fastest Quad Xeon by 18 percent over here.