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There is a war going on. A war between AMD and Intel that started just
as soon as the first AMD designed and produced x86 compatible processor
came on the market. For a long time, Intel was the undisputed leader in
the processor market and the driving force of innovation in the entire
computer hardware industry. Then with the first Athlon series processors
from AMD the situation changed dramatically and Intel was finally forced
to take a deep breath and admit that the mighty company was caught
unprepared by an ant-sized opponent.
Nowadays, the war between AMD and Intel is raging on more than one
front. On one hand, there is the battle for supremacy on the performance
field, where Intel still leads, at least until the next generation of
AMD processors will hit the market. This battle was a losing one from
the start for AMD as it was forced to compete with single and dual cored
processors against Intel's quad core family and the performance
difference was sensible. On the other hand, in the battle to attract
customers by offering them a good price for every processor bought, both
sides are kind of equally sized. However the price cuts hurt AMD much
more than Intel. The final front where AMD and Intel are meeting is the
energy consumption one as both private consumers and corporate ones are
now interested in a greener technology, one that can deliver the
promised amount of computing power without needing too much energy. And
on this battlefield AMD is emerging as a victor, as its processors are
much greener and more environment friendly.
Tests performed by the independent computer testing firm Neal Nelson and
Associates proved that the Opteron processors designed for server
platforms by AMD are more energy efficient than Intel's Xeon line: "the
AMD based server used 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different
user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle
and waiting for work." The study concluded and was cited by the news Web
based site
InfoWorld, that the energy efficiency in Opteron processors
translates in economies between $20.29 and $36.04 per server, per year,
depending on the workload. At idle speeds, it amounts to a $99.76
per-server, per year saving, the study also said. "AMD must have put a
lot of energy into optimizing the power usage for their products and it
appears that AMD's customers will now realize significant energy
savings," said Neal Nelson, president of the testing group, in a written
statement.
In order to accurately measure the energy consumption on both hardware
platforms, Neal Nelson and Associates took a new approach to this test,
employing a client-server benchmark where Web transactions were
processed against a server running Novell SUSE Linux, Apache2 and MySQL.
The tests were run on similarly configured 3GHz Intel (Woodcrest) Xeon
and AMD Opteron servers. AMD was very pleased to hear about this report
and while no one from the company had a chance to review the report in
any detail they issued a statement: "While we did not review the
methodology for these tests, we are not surprised by the results as they
reiterate what we hear from customers and see in our own labs," said
John Fruehe, manager of worldwide market development for
server/workstation products at AMD, in a written statement. "We
appreciate Neal's efforts to shed additional light on energy-efficient
server computing, as it further validates what we've known is an
important issue for our customers for some time. AMD is committed to
delivering energy-efficient solutions to our customers, as you'll see
when we roll-out our native Quad-Core processor, codenamed 'Barcelona,'
(with the same power and thermals as our dual-core processors) later
this summer and in future products for years to come." |
