In the only raw performance test figures revealed yesterday by Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger at Fall IDF in San Francisco, preliminary tests of the company"s forthcoming quad-core "Harpertown" architecture Xeon 5400 show it beating a quad-core Opteron 2300 system in the critical SPEC floating point throughput rate test by just over 4%.
"We have leadership on a broad range of benchmarks," Gelsinger proclaimed yesterday, "literally every benchmark. But the area where competition is closest is in bandwidth-intensive and floating-point areas. And what we see here is [that], with the improvement of the 1600 [MHz] front-side bus, [and] the larger cache of 3.2 GHz, going from [Intel] Clovertown to Harpertown, a 34% improvement."
Intel"s tests showed a current generation (Clovertown) Xeon X5365 scoring a 66.9 in the SPECfp_rate2006 test. BetaNews confirmed that number this morning with the SPEC database, which revealed it to be a peak performance number, not a base (mean or average) performance number; for the dual-processor Supermicro X7DB8+ system used by Intel in that test, the base performance score was 63.1.