AMD and Intel are locked in a battle for datacenter and these days that means pumping out processors that make easy work of workloads in an enery efficient manner. Anandtech takes a look at how the chipmakers fare in the low-power x86 rack server space, devoid of the lofty green marketing claims that have afflicted the PR departments of tech companies (you know who you are!).
What did author Johan De Gelas find?
The usual caveats apply. Essentially, if a computer server can’t handle what you’re gonna throw at it, it matters not if it’s outfitted with a ‘green’ processor. And let’s not forget the price premium commanded by these chips…
Our measurements made it very clear that from a performance/watt point of view that the Xeon L5520 beats the Opteron EE. The point of the Opteron EE is of course the fact that the maximum power consumed is 16W lower. In the non-virtualized world, the Opteron EE may be an alternative to those on a quest for a very low power server who feel that Supermicro’s Atom and Dell’s VIA Nano based servers are too slow. It will probably also find a home in some custom made ultra dense server systems.
It’s not all doom and gloom for AMD, and nor is price the only metric that went into evaluating low-power servers from ASUS, Chenbro and Supermicro, the latter of which provides four servers in a 2U form factor via its innovative Twin2 server (pictured above).
A worthy read if you’re amidst some server planning.
Source: Testing the latest x86 rack servers and low power server CPUs – AnandTech
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