Shootouts

Showdown: Barcelona vs. Clovertown vs. Harpertown

By Vijay Anand - 13 Nov 2007

Test Setup & Benchmarks

Test Setup & Benchmarks

First up, we'll detail the testbed details before bringing on the benchmark numbers. Since these are server level hardware, we received three different racks, each catering to a processor generation. AMD's Barcelona server rack came by the way of a Tyan motherboard in their Transport GT24 chassis. However, it's an unreleased version as it's based off a yet-to-be-announced Tyan S3993 server board using a yet-to-be launched Serverworks/Broadcom HT2100 chipset. Still, everything worked fine in our testing. Although we would have very much liked to get our hands on the AMD's current Barcelona at 2GHz, we had little choice but to benchmark the next best option at 1.9GHz.

Our AMD Barcelona 2P server was from Tyan and to-date, but oddly this model has yet to be launched in retail.

Expectedly, Intel's Harpertown rack was also one of the evaluation models from Supermicro which was using a X7DWN+ motherboard (Stoakley). Since the platform and solution from Supermicro are at a pre-release stage, you should take the performance numbers in this article as a guide and not an absolute final. From the information we have to date, the Intel Harpertown Xeon on this system is the second fastest SKU at 3GHz (using a 1.6GHz FSB) and goes by the model name of the E5472 processor. The fastest Harpertown Xeon is a 3.2GHz part. The 3GHz Harpertown is perfect for our article since the equivalent comparison Clovertown we had was a 3GHz part as well.

Intel's Harpertown evaluation unit was courtesy of Supermicro.

The Clovertown machine was based on a standard Bensley platform using the Intel 5000X (Greencreek) motherboard. Processors tested on this platform were the Xeon L5320 (1.86GHz, 1066MHz FSB, low-voltage), Xeon X5355 (2.66GHz, 1333MHz FSB) and the Xeon X5365 (3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB). The Xeon L5320 at US$320 is equivalently priced to that of the AMD Opteron 2347 at US$316 and should serve as the focal point of our comparison in this article. The Xeon X5365 processor's results are shown as a point of comparison to relate the best of the Clovertown series in performance against both AMD's Barcelona (since it is just one step below the top SKU) and to contrast against the equivalently clocked Harpertown system.

Intel's 5000X based workstation platform housed our Clovertown processor testbed.

All machines were equipped with dual physical processors and 8GB of total system memory. The operating system of our choice was Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 R2 edition. Note that while the Barcelona and Harpertown systems came with ATI's ES1000 display controller embedded on the board, the Clovertown machine is of a workstation class with no on-board graphics. As such we've installed an MSI GeForce 8400 graphics card, which is one of the more 'basic' of the lot, but more importantly, it has very low power consumption and thermal envelope - though still not comparable with that of any on-board graphics.

AMD Opteron Barcelona Configuration

  • Tyan S3993 motherboard (Serverworks/Broadcom HT2100 chipset)
  • 2 x Opteron 2347 (1.9GHz) processors
  • 4 x 2GB Micron Registered DDR2-667 memory modules
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ATI ES1000 on-board graphics - ATI driver version 8.24.3.0
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Standard X64 R2


Intel Xeon Harpertown Configuration

  • Supermicro X7DWN+motherboard
  • 2 x Intel Xeon E5472 (3.0GHz) processors
  • 4 x 2GB Nanya FB-DIMM DDR2-667 memory modules
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ATI ES1000 on-board graphics - ATI driver version 8.24.3.0
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Standard X64 R2


Intel Xeon Clovertown Configuration

  • Intel Enterprise Server S5000XVN (Intel 5000X chipset)
  • 2 x Intel Xeon L5320 (1.86GHz), X5355 (2.67GHz), X5365 (3.0GHz) processors
  • 8 x 1GB ATP FB-DIMM DDR2-533 memory modules
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 8400 GS 256MB Tubrocache - with NVIDIA Forceware 162.18 (64-bit edition)
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Standard X64 R2


The benchmarks used in this review include:-

  • SPECCPU 2000 v1.3
  • Lightwave 3D 9.0 (64-bit edition)
  • Cinebench 9.5 (64-bit edition)
  • Cinebench 10 (64-bit edition)
  • SunGard Adaptive Analytics 3.5
  • Black Scholes 3.5
  • POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 22 (32-bit SSE2 optimized & 64-bit editions)
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