Dell with AMD Vs. IBM with Xeon: which is better?

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I’m looking at two servers: the IBM X3850 X5 (7143-AC1) (four Intel Xeon E7-4830 processors) and the Dell PowerEdge r715 (two AMD Opteron 6380 processors).

The PowerEdge has a L3 cache size of 16 MB (shared with the L2 cache), base clock speed of 2.5 GHz, and 32 threads total.

The IBM server has 24 MB of Intel Smart Cache, a bus speed of 6.4 GT/s, a base clock speed of 2.13 GHz, and 64 threads total.

However, there is a bit of a grey area.

The PowerEdge server offers less overhead and faster INT performance (as it has half the number of sockets). As an added bonus, the Opteron processor also allows for AVX (advanced vector extensions). That said, the IBM server would be faster in FP operations, meaning that it would have a higher number of FLOPS.

So that means that the PowerEdge has: lower overhead, faster INT, and AVX

While the IBM server has: Faster FP operations, more RAM, more cache, and higher base and top clock speed

Both have the same number of cores installed, support multi-threading, and the same amount of total RAM/memory.

Ultimately, which would be best for OpenMC?

Edit: The IBM server is the one with more RAM

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It’s very difficult to predict which CPU is going to be better for a particular simulation without actually measuring it. Other than looking at CPU benchmark numbers for each of these products, I’m not sure I have much to suggest. Both of these CPUs look to be quite old — are you not considering newer processors that likely offer better bang for you buck?

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Thanks for your response. Most newer severs will only get me around 12 cores, as my budget is $380. Would it be better for me to buy a newer server like a PowerEdge 720 that only has 12 cores (as opposed to the ones here that have 32) but would be newer?

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Ah, ok, in that case it may make sense to go for something older that has more cores. In the absence of hard performance measurements using OpenMC, again I would suggest looking at benchmarks (e.g., here) as a rough guide on what to expect.

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