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AMD Opteron More "Power Thrifty" Than Intel Xeon

White paper with detail test results: [Word Format] [PDF Format]

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Summary of Test Results, Power Consumed During 30 Minute Test Run
Active
Users
XeonWatt Hours OpteronWatt Hours WH Sav./ 30 Min. Opteron
% Better
Idle 143.5 87.7 55.8 63.6
50 160.0 144.0 14.9 10.3
75 159.4 144.5 14.9 10.3
100 159.1 144.2 14.9 10.3
150 159.9 141.2 18.7 13.2
200 153.5 138.8 14.7 10.6
250 153.7 139.3 14.4 10.3
300 153.7 139.6 14.1 10.1
350 153.9 139.7 14.2 10.2
400 154.0 139.7 14.3 10.2
450 154.2 139.8 14.4 10.3
500 154.4 139.7 14.7 10.5

Chicago, IL, May 16, 2007 -- An AMD Opteron processor-based server consumed from 10 to 63 percent less power when compared to an Intel Xeon (Woodcrest) processor-based server during some recent tests at the Neal Nelson & Associates computer testing laboratory.

"These tests of AMD's Opteron show a measurable reduction in power consumed in both the idle state and under heavy processing load," observed Neal Nelson, president of the independent consulting group.

The measured power reduction, when applied to an estimate of the Xeon/Opteron market size, represent potential lifetime energy savings of 175,970,880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity with an estimated reduction of 199,199,036 tons of greenhouse (CO2) gas emissions.

The tests were run with the Neal Nelson SQL Transaction Benchmark which generates traffic from up to 500 simultaneous World Wide Web clients and submits the transactions to a server system. It stresses all major sub-systems in a computer's architecture including memory access, inter-process communication, context switching, disk I/O and network I/O.

The two servers in this test were configured with the same clock speed and memory size. They were tested with the same disk drives and operating systems which had been loaded from the same media. The machines were set up with the same system tunables and ran the same application code which had been compiled by the same compiler with the same compiler options.

Nelson's firm has a long history of performance consulting to some of the world's largest computer customers including the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Internal Revenue Service, McDonalds, WalMart and Federal Express. His performance measurement expertise has assisted with purchasing decisions for billions of dollars worth of computer equipment.

The Neal Nelson benchmarking laboratory is available to commercial and government users for independent computer performance tests.


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