Older Opteron Outperforms the Newer Xeon: A Memory Intensive Application Study of Server Based Microprocessors

Abstract

In this paper we describe the performance evaluation and comparison of a older "dual processor dual core AMD Opteron" server processor and a newer "single processor quad core Intel Xeon" server processor, on their performance in executing memory intensive applications. We evaluated the performance of the two micro-architectures by analyzing the results obtained from the respective microprocessor hardware performance monitoring counters. Our experiment results show that the older Opteron gives a better throughput than the newer Xeon. With this study we found that the older "dual processor dual core AMD Opteron" outperforms the newer "single processor quad core Intel Xeon" in executing memory intensive software applications.