Hmmm... the TechReport has Barcelona benchmarks out and it's an interesting insight into what makes the new AMD chip has to offer and what it can potentially do.
At this point in time, however, it looks to be a similar case as with the orignal Athlon64 vs. Pentium 4 EE... some things are better, some things aren't good.
It appears that - while performance is dramatically improved in some areas, some haven't. One of the potential culprits is a L3 cache which seems to whack the new Opterons with a massive latency penalty (~23ns) and this, in turn, compromises the chips' performance.
However, the chip does seem to scale very well with clock speed but at the end of the day, there is no telling how it will do when its desktop cousin is pitted against a Conroe/Penryn.
Saying that, however, it uses a lot less power than previous Opterons.
Check it out
At this point in time, however, it looks to be a similar case as with the orignal Athlon64 vs. Pentium 4 EE... some things are better, some things aren't good.
It appears that - while performance is dramatically improved in some areas, some haven't. One of the potential culprits is a L3 cache which seems to whack the new Opterons with a massive latency penalty (~23ns) and this, in turn, compromises the chips' performance.
However, the chip does seem to scale very well with clock speed but at the end of the day, there is no telling how it will do when its desktop cousin is pitted against a Conroe/Penryn.
Saying that, however, it uses a lot less power than previous Opterons.
Check it out