Is AMD Opteron More Power Efficient than Intel Quad-Core?
According to the most recent tests conducted by the independent computer performance expert Neal Nelson, servers powered by Intel Quad-Core XEON CPUs deliver 14% more throughput, while servers using AMD Quad-Core Opteron CPUs consume 41% less power, and these servers integrate 4, 8 and 16 GB memory sizes of 1GB modules. This is Neal Nelson’s explanation for the results: “By themselves the Intel processor chips may use less power, but all current Intel Xeon servers require the use of Fully Buffered memory modules. These FB-memory modules appear to consume more power than the DDR-II memory modules used by the AMD based servers. The result is that in many cases an Opteron based server actually uses less total power than a Xeon based server.†The essential tool used by Neal was the Power Efficiency Benchmark client server test type where 500 worldwide web users from 32 different computers were submitting transactions to the server that was running Apache 2 software, MySQL database and S
