Knockout: Intel’s Woodcrest 3.0 GHz outclasses AMD’s Opteron

Summary

In February 2006, Intel boasted that its upcoming processors with core architecture would be 20% faster than competitive products from its rival AMD. What seemed at the time to be a somewhat presumptuous claim has turned out to be true. Our benchmarking tests confirmed that the Xeon Woodcrest processor for servers and workstations outclasses by far the rest of the x86 architectures – including AMD’s Opteron CPUs or the new Xeon 5070 Dempsey with NetBurst architecture.

The reputed CPU2000 benchmark demonstrated that the 3.0 GHz Woodcrest is between 35% and 77% (base and rate) faster than the 3.46 GHz Xeon 5070. The Woodcrest’s superiority is impressive – not only for the CPU2000 benchmark suite. In other comparisons with cache-based rendering programs, audio decoding, or the extremely compute-intensive Linpack tests, the Woodcrest processor was 20% to 50% ahead of the next best competitor. In these tests, no difference whatsoever was discernible between single and multi-thread applications.

Intel is planning to unveil the Xeon 5100 Woodcrest processor for the Bensley/Glidewell platform in June 2006. Following this great downfield pass, AMD will have to go all out to catch up. It is doubtful that the Socket F Opteron with a DDR2 memory controller scheduled for Q3 of 2006 will surprise us with such a boost in performance. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate AMD – perhaps a new generation of impressive Opteron processors is just around the corner! (cvi)