Wednesday 24 Dec 2008, 09:52am

Two Intel cores beat four of AMDs

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Benchmarks of the Core i7 Intel Nehalem processor are causing some excitement - can two of Intel's cores really beat four of AMD's?

Apparently so, according to benchmarks at Anandtech. Both HP and Fujitsu-Siemens published SAP benchmarks of Xeon 5570-based systems, and the results got exciting: "The SAP numbers are absolutely astonishing, as Intel's dual socket is able to outperform quad socket [AMD] Opteron machines," says Johan de Gelas at Anandtech.

A 3 GHz Nehalem outperformed the latest Opteron by a margin as high as 80 per cent reports Gelas, a result which may be due to hyperthreading. The Fujitsu-Siemens Primergy server ran 16 threads on eight cores in the test, which boosts SAP performance a lot, because "the SAP application has very low IPC [inter-process-communication] and is very parallel".

"Hats off to the Intel engineers," says Anandtech, and we'd have to agree.

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