Today we are looking at a dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE configuration using our Linux Benchmarking suite. The AMD Opteron 4376 HE is a lower power chip aimed as a mid-range solution between the UP Opteron 3300 series and the UP, DP and 4P Opteorn 6300 series. We often receive questions here, especially after our initial dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE review a few months ago. Today’s article has a simple purpose in mind, showing the performance of the platform in Linux.
Dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE Test Configuration
For this test, we assumed a basic dedicated or cloud server platform. This setup should be fairly typical of a dual socket cloud server.
- CPU: Dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE
- OS Drive: OCZ Vertex 4 256GB
- Enclosure: Norco RPC-4224
- Power Supply: Corsair AX750 750w 80Plus Gold PSU
- OS: Windows 8 Pro 64-bit, Ubuntu 12.04 Server LTS
- Motherboard: Supermicro H8DCL-6F
- Memory: 64GB Kingston ECC 1600 CL11 DDR3 8x 8GB RDIMMs
These should be fairly standard styles of Opteron 4300 series configurations.
The Linux Opteron Benchmarks
Since we provided some guideposts in the Windows results in our previous reviews, we are now focusing on the Linux benchmark suite. This is the test suite STH will use going forward.
Hardinfo Performance
hardinfo is a well known Linux benchmark that has been around for years. It tests a number of CPU performance aspects.
hardinfo presents us with a number of interesting results. First off, we see a favorable comparison between the dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE configurations and the Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 series. We also see tight competition between the dual AMD platform and some of the low power Intel platforms. One must remember that the low power triple channel memory controller Xeons are really the focus of the AMD Opteron 4376 HE.
UnixBench 5.1.3 Performance
UnixBench may be a defacto standard for Linux benchmarking these days. There are two main versions, one that tests single CPU performance on that tests multiple CPU performance. UnixBench segments these results. We run both sets of CPU tests. Here are the single threaded results:
In terms of single threaded performance, we do see a major deviation from what we would normally expect. The lower-power AMD cores in many tests fall below even the higher clocked, higher IPC Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 range.
In terms of multi-threaded performance the AMD Opteron chips perform well. Certainly not a clear victor, but performance is in-line with what we would expect.
c-ray 1.1 Performance
c-ray is a very interesting ray tracing benchmark. It provides both consistent results and some clear separation. Ray tracing is generally a great multi-threaded CPU benchmark. For this test we use both a simple 7500×3500 render and a more complex 1920×1200 render. Here are the results:
Here we are seeing results with the dual Opteron configuration performing on par with the dual Intel Xeon E5-2430L platform.
Crafty Chess Performance
Crafty is a well known chess benchmark. It is also one where we saw issues last time when benchmarking ARM platforms. Here are the Crafty Chess results from simply running “crafty bench”:
Again here we see strong performance compared to the Intel dual socket triple channel memory processors. We are also seeing a clear trend where in the single threaded realm, the new Haswell based chips are performing very well.
Phoronix Test Suite Performance
We are using four tests from the Phoronix Test Suite: pts/stream, pts/compress-7zip, pts/openssl and pts/pybench.
- STREAM by John D. McCalpin, Ph.D. is a very well known memory benchmark benchmark. S
- 7-zip compression benchmarks were a mainstay in our Windows suite so we are including it again on the Linux side as a compression benchmark.
- The pts/openssl benchmark is very dependent on the CPU architecture being used
- Python is a widely used scripting language and pyBench is a nice single-threaded Python benchmark.
Here are the results of the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks:
In our pts tests we see the massive bandwidth of the Intel Xeon E5 platform perform very well. The dual channel memory controllers in our AMD Opteron platform simply do not provide the same memory bandwidth. We also can clearly see that the CPU performance is near what we have seen in other tests.
Conclusion
Overall the dual AMD Opteron 4376 HE server performed well in our tests. One can see that with aggressive pricing these chips have been popular in the cloud market. We saw our Rackspace cloud instances run on AMD 4000 series platforms as did some of our AWS platforms. For many home/ SMB lab users, the Opteron 4000 series being able to accept registered ECC DIMMs and dual processors should be a positive point as these chips hit ebay.
