ClusterFunk

Further to my blogs on Intel and AMD CPUs I thought I would rap it all up with some (hopefully) useful comparison information.

AMDs comparison of Quad Opteron v Intel Quad Xeon

Intel and AMD have significantly differing approach for memory architecture which means that either company can pick a process suited to their architecture and perform much betters than the competition in benchmark testing.

Intel Positive
All of the system memory is available to all/each socket/core in an Intel CPU. However memory is dedicated to specific cores in an AMD CPU. Therefore if I want to use memory for core 1 activity that is assigned to core 2 in an AMD CPU I effectively have to use up two core’s for that process. This is not the case with the Intel CPU. Test that exploit these criteria favour Intel

AMD Positive
If I want to write to memory with multiple CPU/cores Intel CPUs share a common bus which is not the case with AMD CPU. Test that exploit these criteria favour AMD.

OK this labours the point a little (and is very simplistic) but you get the picture. More information here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_(computing)      

So we need an impartial (test if possible)

This site offers just such a solution

PassMark™ Software
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

And from a VMware perspective you have also got VMware’s VMmark, although this is focused at complete systems. Still very useful.  
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html