Results - SPEC CPU2000 v1.3

SPEC CPU2000 version 1.3 consists of two benchmark suites for measuring highly compute-intensive integer and floating point performance. Single threaded performance tests showed that the Clovertown at 1.86GHz was notably ahead of the Barcelona at 1.9GHz in both integer and floating point workloads. Expectedly, the 3GHz parts from the Clovertown and Harpertown series held the pole position in this test.




SPEC CPU's rate tests run multiple copies of the speed test to load all available processing cores. We configured the benchmark for two-user, four-user and eight-user workloads for the respective processors, and Intel once again kicks up the win effortlessly for the integer workloads. Floating point workloads were not exactly a walk in the park for Intel as we found AMD's Barcelona matching its competitor at the four-user workload, but at the eight-user workload, the Opteron 2347 posed a serious challenge to even Intel's top processor. However, the upcoming Harpertown Xeon processors managed to fend off the impressive showing of the Barcelona processor with its more updated core architecture and the better platform.




However, there's more to the floating point rate score if we systematically dissect the performance of various individual workloads. In the floating point workload set, we can see that scores for all the 14 individual floating point benchmarks were pretty divided. Some results highly favored Intel's processor while others bent over to AMD's side. We realized that benchmarks which were mostly memory intensive like the 171.swim workload (shallow water modeling) and the 179.art workload (image recognition, neural networks) benefited from AMD's built-in memory controller and direct connectivity to the physical memory. However when it comes to highly FPU compute intensive calculations which required less loading of the memory, Intel led the way in workloads like the 178.galgel (computational fluid mechanics) and 200.sixtrack (high energy nuclear physics accelerator design). Here's an extract of some of the results we have discussed above:-


Pitting the AMD Opteron 2347 and the Intel Xeon L5320 processors, we can see that the compute intensive floating-point workloads like 178.galgel and 200.sixtrack are a fair bit faster on the Intel platform. For highly memory intensive workloads, AMD turned the tables with a more than 50% lead. So there doesn't seem to be one solution that fits all needs, since it really depends on the workloads fed to the processor to justify which is the better option. However, Intel's Harpertown Xeon processor's updated core and platform might just come close to being that 'dream' platform. Clock for clock when compared with the Clovertown counterpart, the new Xeon E5472 offered huge gains. Even on the memory intensive 179.art workload, Intel's scores were completely off the chart at a staggering 846 points! That puts it at around eight times faster than any of the Clovertowns' scores for the same test.

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