"Simulations conducted in AMD laboratories indicate that certain database applications will see performance improvements up to 70 percent and certain floating point applications will experience performance gains of up to 40 percent over platforms powered by current dual-core AMD Opteron processors."
This is almost certainly based on data presented by AMD several months ago at their "Virtual IT Experience." At InvestorVillage, they have screenshots (linked below).
"Certain database applications will see performance improvements up to 70 percent"
The Virtual IT Experience shows gains of 70% for OLTP. They do not specify what benchmark they used, but it has been widely speculated (and assumed?) that this is TPC. This is probably the source for the rumors (e.g. in this RWT article) that AMD claims a 10-15% TPC-C advantage with Barcelona.
"Certain floating point applications will experience performance gains of up to 40 percent"
In the Virtual IT Experience AMD predicted gains of 40% for specfp_rate2000. This is almost certainly where this number comes from.
What this tells us
The thing that interests me about both of these slides is that they suggest 10-15% better OLTP performance and ~30% (Some say 40%) better specfp_rate performance than a Xeon 5355. That's a 2.66 GHz Clovertown. There has been a lot of speculation that Intel will release a 3 GHz Clovertown this year, although to my knowledge Intel has never stated this. If they do, and we assume perfect scaling, the 3GHz Clovertown would be about 13% faster than the 2.66 GHz Clovertown. That would make it about the same as Barcelona in AMD's OLTP benchmark, and still significantly behind in specfp_rate.
What this does not tell us
AMD does not say what OLTP benchmark they used. It's been speculated that it's TPC, but then why wouldn't AMD just say TPC?
AMD also does not tell us the clockspeed of the Barcelona processor used for comparison. At this point, it's probably safe to assume that the Barcelona is the highest clock they plan on releasing in "mid-2007." We also don't know how the rest of the simulated platforms were set up.
These are quad-core server benchmarks, most likely selected to highlight Barcelona's strength. We don't know how Rev. H should do in other environments, although the rumor on these forums is ~10% faster than C2D per clock.
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