Intel e5405

We are building a new version of a JackRabbit for a customer. During some of our testing, we booted it running SuSE 10.2 diskless, and I ran a GAMESS benchmark. We have been using this for years to exercise machines, and get rough performance comparisons. On 4 CPU Opteron 275’s with 8 GB ram, it takes ~3 hours. So I ran it recently on an AMD 2350 2.0 GHz quad core and our new JackRabbit. Very similar configurations, same binary, built with the Portland Group compilers a while ago.

Opteron finished in ~80 minutes on 8 cores. The e5405 finished in 65 minutes on 8 cores. Same ram, same clock speed. Opteron has 2x the memory bus bandwidth. e5405 has much more cache, and this does likely play a large role in this performance delta. It also looks like the internal SSE/FPUs on the Harpertown is quite fast. Clovertown was a nice chip, we have an 8 core unit in lab, it makes a great build machine, a nice workstation chip. Harpertown is very nice. The Harpertown unit was considerably lower cost than the AMD 2350 chip, about half. Similar motherboard costs, similar memory costs (well the FBDIMMs do cost a bit more).