Armari MS-9206-R Xeon Server
Armari came up with the goods again for the comparison Intel hardware. Their MS-9206-R is built along the same lines as the RM-O64-1AE. 1U rackmount chassis, server motherboard, plenty of system memory, small but powerful IDE disk subsystem. This is the Intel 32-bit equivalent of their HPC cluster Opteron boxes and the perfect foil for our test Opteron box.Here's the spec:
[*] 2 x Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors (512KB L2, 3.06GHz)
[*] MSI MS-9125 serverboard
[---] Dual Intel Xeon uPGA PGA604 sockets
[---] 6 184-pin DDR DIMM slots (12GB ECC DDR266 system maximum)
[---] Supports registered ECC DDR memory only
[---] Intel E7501 MCH [Memory Controller Hub]
[---] Intel ICH3-S [Southbridge]
[---] Intel® 82870P2 PCI/PCI-X 64-bit Hub 2 [P64H2]
[---] Intel® 82546EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
[---] Integrated Adaptec AIC-7902 Ultra-320 SCSI adapter
[---] Integrated Promise 20271 ATA133 IDE RAID controller
[---] 2 x PCI-X (64-bit/100MHz) slots (one for Adaptec ZCR)
[---] 1 x mini PCI slot
[---] Integrated ATI Rage XL graphics controller
[*] 2GB registered ECC DDR266 memory, 4 x 1GB per processor
[*] 2 x Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200rpm WD80JB
[*] Rioworks R3122 Slimline CDROM
[*] Rioworks R3122 Slimline FDD
A slightly different take on what makes up an Intel based HPC computer, compared to the Opteron machine. The motherboard houses all the differences. Intel don't make use of a tunneled serial bus protocol for CPU communication with each other and the other components of the system. Rather all connected CPU's on an Intel motherboard ride the same AGTL+ bus. AGTL+ is a shared, switched signalled bus where each CPU signals its use of the bus to all other CPU's on the system. The CPU can then generate bus traffic without fear of a bus collision with any of the other CPU's in the system. You can see the disadvantage straight away, compared to independent HyperTransport connections for an Opteron system. With each CPU sharing the bus, depending on CPU I/O traffic to the MCH, bus saturation can have a limiting effect on performance.
Conversely, AMD SMP systems since the 760MPX and original Athlon MP systems, have had a dedicated CPU link to the northbridge, per processor. Simply, each AMD CPU gets a full bandwidth connection to the system.
The E7501 MCH is the northbridge in the system, handling the CPU I/O interface, implementing the AGTL+ bus protocol, the dual channel memory controller and the connection to the ICH3-S southbridge. The memory controller, like that onboard the Opteron processor, is a 144-bit wide dual channel ECC controller. Supporting up to DDR266 memory, it gives the connected processors in the system up to 4.2GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. With each CPU operating at 533MHz front side bus frequency, giving 3.2GB/sec of I/O bandwidth, the system appears to be well balanced in that configuration.
Intel handle peripheral I/O and networking duties too on the MS-9125, with their own ICH3-S southbridge, P64H2 PCI-X segment bridge and a single 82546EM Gigabit ethernet controller hooked up to that. The PCI-X controller has a dedicated 1GB/s Intel Hub connection to the MCH, as does the ICH3-S (running slightly slower), ensuring that the PCI-X controller gets all the bandwidth it needs.
Less memory than the configured Opteron machine, but without the ability to remotely stress an 8GB memory size, the Intel machine wont be at a disadvantage in the benchmarks due to only 2GB.
SCSI is provided, two U320 channels to be precise, but unused. The pair of WD800JB's hang off the Promise controller in RAID1 configuration and perform host operating system duties only. We aren't testing the disk subsystems of either machine, so a mismatched disk I/O configuration doesn't matter.
The same RageXL chip as the Opteron machine provides the display capabilities on both computers.
In summary, quite a machine. The obvious disadvantages compared to the Opteron machine are the memory bandwidth deficit, the shared, slower CPU bus and the lack of L2 cache. In server applications, fat CPU caches can make all the difference to performance, and the Intel CPU's have half the amount the Opteron's do. Will clock speed make up for it? That's what we're going to test.
Intel have a large 1MB cache version of the 3.06 Xeon, but in a price/performance comparison, it can't match a similarly configured Opteron machine. We weren't able to obtain 1MB 3.06's for this review, shoot us for that if you will. But we can argue, quite rightly, that the 512KB version is the Opteron's main competitor.
Finally, before we move on to the test setup and benchmarks, the Xeon processors were the pioneers of HyperThreading before it hit with the current desktop range of Pentium 4's. It was enabled on the Xeon machine throughout testing, since that was the recommended configuration of the system as shipped.
Now for the obligatory nude shot and mini gallery.
Removable disk drive
Bare disk caddy
Bare Socket 604
6GHz of shrouded Intel Xeon
