mesht

my company is getting a new sets of workstations for rendering purposes. we have been reading about the new Dual/Quad Core Xeon and comparing them to AMD Athlon, the new Athlon ( not sure the name of the AMD ), considered the highest end of the AMD line. so which is better in terms of speed?

ronski_g23

Err, you must be refering to the AMD X2 or AM2 (not really quite sure of the right name).. Or others find the AMD Opterons Duals, strong. You'll find alot of guys here supporting you on this thread just wait...

manta

Right now intel is ahead, probably for the next year at least...

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mtutaj

I've been an AMD house for the last 6 years and now are looking at the dual xeon Quad cores as a new render nodes. Still pricing things out. we shall see what happens. The render problems you had 2 years ago with mixing I
ntel and AMD are gone with all the tests I have done

Mike

AJLynn

Seems you can get dual-dual Athlon FX boxes now that are competitive with dual-dual or single-quad Intels.

blaz

I have dual xeon and dual opteron for workstation. i still feel the xeon more stable and at the moment perform faster with vray r1.5. as for final render the opteron wins the competition. well thats just my input for you. cheers...

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ShaunDon

We recently added a workstation from Dell to our office of mostly custom-built computers. It has dual Xeon Proc 5050 (3ghz), so four cores and 4gb of RAM. Our render farm is composed of dual Opteron 275 nodes with 4gb of RAM each, and as of our last weekend of rendering the Xeon was pacing about 20% slower per frame than the Opterons.

Also interesting to note that my workstation, which is the same specs as our Opteron nodes, was built last June for about US $3k in components, while the slower Xeon workstation from Dell cost about $3400 when we bought it two weeks ago.

One note -- Dell enables hyperthreading on the machine, which I think is actually slowing it down since it has to divide the RAM between eight processing threads. We're going to try turning it off and seeing what effect it has, we just haven't gotten around to it yet. Either way, my money is still on the Opterons.

Hope this helps,
Shaun

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AJLynn

Note that the Xeon 5000 series and the 5100 series are entirely different CPUs. The 5000 (Dempsey) is a Netburst CPU (e.g., the Pentium 4 architecture) and the 5100 (Woodcrest) is a Core architecture chip. These days it would be inadvisable to buy a Dempsey, since a Woodcrest at the same GHz would be approximately twice as fast and can be much faster than an Opteron. Also, Woodcrest doesn't have Hyperthreading - that's specific to Netburst CPUs and it only works because the Netburst pipeline is so inefficient that it lets you slip in an extra instruction every once in a while without penalty.

DavidR

All the rendering benchmarks so far -Max, mr, Vray, C4d, PovRay, etc -all show the same thing: Intel 51xx and 53xx are superior in every case, at least in the 1-2 CPU space -4 CPU+ servers show different results. I specced an Opteron 275 renderfarm at work, and have a 1700+ at home (time to upgrade!), so I'm not an Intel fanboy, but the picture has never been clearer: Intel is faster for everything, but make sure you get the 51xx or 53xx -50xx and other models are horrible Netburst crap, and are about the worst choice you can make today. Dell and others still sell 50xx, 51xx, and 53xx, all branded as Xeon, but there's an enormous difference in rendering speed, power requirement, and cooling requirement (read noise), with the newer chips being better for all those things. I wish AMD had something with competitive performance, but they don't, and now have to compete on price, where things are fuzzier.

Macer

As mentioned above it depends on how many cores you are going to run and what resolution you usually render at. See the link for more interesting benchmarks on render servers: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2897&p=9

I thought that intel was way ahead at the moment, but when looking at 8+ cores it doesn't seem to scale as well as the opterons (there goes my plan for a dual 53xx Xeon). But with the reality of costs in mind, I think intel could still be the way to go! Either Core 2 quad (cheaper), or maybe dual 51xx Xeon (faster-at least at normal resolutions)

I'm starting to get confused with all the variables......