AMD Opteron Istanbul vs. Intel i7 Nehalem/Lynnfield: FIGHT!

AMD and Intel are locked into a performance and thermal battle with the Istanbul Opterons and Nehalem/Lynnfield i7. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers debate the pros and cons of the new server-class CPUs.

By Richi Jennings: your humble blogwatcher, who selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Sarah Palin sounds better auto-tuned...

Ian Williams has the facts, without the friction:

Chip maker AMD has announced five new six-core additions to its Opteron processor family that it says are even more power efficient that their predecessors. The first three 55W ACP Opteron HE CPUs ... are aimed at cloud computing and webserver environments. Using AMD's Direct Connect architecture, they promise power savings of up to 18 per cent.
...
The remaining two Opteron SE processors ... are designed for high performance and mission-critical workloads such as database and CRM applications. Both are rated at 105W, nearly double their HE counterparts. The HE processors are shipping from today in HP ProLiant G6 systems.

Timothy Prickett-Morgan bites:

Chip maker designer and seller Advanced Micro Devices will today trot out some additions to its six-core "Istanbul" Opteron processors for servers, adding faster and hotter versions of the chips as well as cooler and slower ones for the energy conscious.
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The HE chips are a bin sorting to figure out which standard Opteron parts can run at a lower amperage, while the EE chips actually run at a lower voltage. The SE chips crank up the clocks and therefore the heat.

Wolfgang Grüner says AMD is greener: [Du bist gefeuert -Ed.]

AMD is aware that it cannot compete in terms of performance with Nehalem and therefore markets the “balanced” approach with Istanbul, which would include power consumption. And, in fact, the Istanbul chips seem to consume less power than the direct Intel rivals ... at least in 4-way, 24-core configurations, the green team appears to have an advantage over Intel at this time, if we believe the official integer results posted for the Spec CPU2006 benchmark. ... AMD is careful comparing its 6-core processors to Intel products, but mentioned that its HE processors deliver 18% more performance per watt than its standard CPUs.
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Down the road, AMD will offer EE chips that drop their average power consumption to just 45 watts..

Dean Takahashi observes that AMD is keeping up the pressure on Intel:

The introduction is the latest volley in the ongoing tennis match AMD is playing with Intel. With these two new versions, AMD is spreading out its product line and executing better. It launched its first six-core chip on June 1, about six months ahead of schedule. Now it’s adding more flavors.
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But the market remains extremely competitive. ... AMD has to keep on the treadmill just to make sure that it doesn’t lose ground to the world’s biggest chip maker. ... If AMD keeps this up, it could have a pretty good year. AMD is expected to lose money in the second quarter, but it may do better in the second half of the year.

But Cristian Untaru notes that Intel's not been idle:

Just like the song says have no fear, cause the Lynnfield processors are coming ... From what has been floating around the Internet's rough seas, it seems that Intel is preparing to introduce three Lynnfield models in September ... made on 45nm, come in an LGA 1156 package, have an integrated dual channel DDR3-1333 memory controller, 8MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 95W.
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Also, even before the Lynnfield parts will come into play, sometime in August, Intel is expected to introduce the P55 chipset, and enable manufacturers to release motherboards based on it. Exciting times are rolling in, we just hope the ol' wallet can survive them.

So what's your take?
Get involved: leave a comment.

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.