Since the release of the new Barcelona core Opteron processors from AMD, the question on the tip of everyones tongues has been "Have AMD finally released a Xeon beater?". Well the guys down in the lab have been rattling their shackles recently, sensing the (mostly) beautiful weather outside they have been clawing at the walls in search of some precious melanin to nourish their greying complexions. Troubled that they might escape forever if released from their cages, we chucked them a proverbial bone to gnaw on, in the form of a comparison between the new quad core Opteron 2350 (Barcelona) and the quad core Intel Xeon processors. As Intel doesnt have a 2.0Ghz quad core Xeon processor, we decided to go for an older 2.66Ghz Xeon - Intel Xeon 5355.

Now seeing as we dont like to do things by halves, we decided to use dual socket Supermicro boards and 8GB of 667Mhz ECC Kingston memory in both test rigs. The full specifications for the test rigs was as follows:

AMD

SuperMicro H8DM8-2 Dual Opteron Socket F
2xAMD Opteron 2350 2way socket F (4x2.0Ghz - 2Mb)
4x2048Mb DDRII 667MHz CL5 ECC REG (Kingston)
32Gb Samsung 2.5" SATA II SSD Drive
Windows XP Professional SP2

Intel

Supermicro X7DAE+ Dual XEON 771 
2xIntel Xeon 5355 (4x2.66Ghz - 2x4Mb) 
4x2048Mb FB DDRII 667MHz CL5 ECC REG (Kingston)
32Gb Samsung 2.5" SATA II SSD Drive
Windows XP Professional SP2

PassMark 6.1

The majority of tests were performed in PassMark 6.1, an excellent environment virtualisation suite which has the resources to really dig away at the surface of the component in the hot seat.

Now before we continue i feel i should draw attention to the fact that the Xeon is factory clocked at 2.66ghz but the Opteron is factory clocked at only 2.00ghz.

Unfortunatelly, our Supermicro board didnt allow us to downclock the Intel Xeon 5355 from 2.66 to 2.0Ghz as to allow us to compare both CPUs clock by clock. Our reasoning for putting these two processors up against each other is that you can obtain them for roughly the same price at the moment and the Opteron, although clocked lower than the Xeon, contains all of the latest technology including an on-board memory controller. Current prices:

AMD 2350 = £190.24 ex VAT
Intel Xeon 5355 (discontinued). The newer 2.66Ghz Xeon parts with 12Mb of cache cost £296.57 ex VAT

Being aware of this from the begining, we were hoping that the superior technology within the AMD chip would help it to catch up to and possibly even overtake the performance of the relatively ancient Intel 5355. Unfortunately, as you can see from the results, this was not quite the case. The Opteron 2350 did very well just in the Floating Point Math and Integer Math, so we decided to invesigate this further with a real-time, purely mathematical test:

Super π

"π" or "Pi", the greek letter, is one of the most important mathematical constants, approximately equal to 3.14159. It represents the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter in Euclidean geometry, which is the same as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius. Many formulas from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π. For more information on π, please follow this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0  

Super π is a program which measures the amount of time a processor takes to calculate π to a set number of decimal digits. We ran the test on both systems with a calculation limit of 8,000,000 digits after the decimal point. The results in the table below are the time in seconds each processor took to calculate Pi to that many decimal digits:

Conclusion

So there you have it. Despite the use of integrated memory controllers, Direct Connect Architecture, enhanced power efficiency, optimal virtualization and many other brand new technologies, the AMD Opteron 2350 just couldn't catch up to the older Intel Xeon 5355. With an aleady struggling product on the market, one can only ponder the reasoning behind AMDs decision to release yet another outperformed series of processors. There is also a lot of speculation floating around in certain circles, as to the solidarity of AMDs move to buy out ATi and perhaps this can shed some light on the disappointing performance of the new Opteron series of processors; Maybe they just have their fingers in too many pies to be able to reach for the coffee and get the drive required to retain their position as one of the top technology companies in the PC market today. The Intel Xeon 5355 is built on older architecture to the AMD Opteron 2350, but can be probably found on ebay for rougly the same price as the Opteron and outperforms it in most tests.

Our final Verdict: Unless your application relies purely on the Floating Point and Integer Math calculations, we would advise to stick to the Intel Xeons processors that can be obtained for as little as £205.27 ex VAT: Intel Xeon 5410 running at 2.33ghz with 12Mb of cache.