Review: Opteron for Servers

First looks

Already when we set up the OS and did some Ad-hoc tests we gathered a few impressions of the performance of the Dual-Opteron machine. Especially under massive loads the Newisys machine seemed much more responsive than its Xeon powered competitors. It looked like AMD's claim that the Opteron was competitive with Intels latest CPUs seemed not too far fetched. But some minor flaws of the Newisys were also clearly visible.

According to the integrated management processor the system runs into thermal problems under high loads. Surprisingly enough this does not affect the hard working CPUs: They clearly operate within their thermal envelope at all times. Instead, the PCI-X-bridge works at the limit of its thermal specification. This is even more strange as this chip has nothing to do at all - all expansion slots are unpopulated.

However, the Newisys board is still a developer sample. For mass production, Newisys has to fix this problem, though. If not, failures with these rack mounted devices seem preassigned. During our tests, which sometimes max out the loads for hours (up to system loads of 2500) the heat was barely acceptable.