AMD Shanghai Shenanigans

Late on Friday some of the first Shanghai benchmarks were found on the internet and spread around and called into question by the Inquirer. The benchmarks in question are SPEC Power tests. These tests would seem to put Shanghai bellow the results for Harperton by a large margin.

Looking at the results right off of the SPEC website it seems that AMD's Shanghai receives a score of 860 at 2.7GHz and 731 at 2.5GHz. These are far below the Intel scores of 1064 for a Xeon X3360 2.8GHz and 1010 for a Xeon L5420 2.5GHz. To further confuse the issue AMD released its own results for the L5420 which are a little more than half what is shown on the SPEC site (561). The Inq calls shenanigans with numbers.

On Saturday, AMD sent a rebuttal to the Inq explaining the numbers and the configurations used.

Read the full story here

Read AMD's rebuttal here

It seems the first numbers from AMD's soon to be launched Shanghai have tipped up online, although AMD is keeping them very quiet indeed.

Results published by SPEC on a benchmark for power efficiency include what appear to be the first Shanghai scores, ahead of AMD's launch on Wednesday.

Shanghai at 2.7GHz manages to score 860, while the 2.5GHz manages a score of 731.

All well and good, except that with those kinds of scores, Shanghai doesn't even come close to Intel's already existing Harpertown chips, let alone Nehalem.

Intel chips certainly seem to be the big winners as far as this particular benchmark is concerned, with Power Leader running Chipzilla's L5430 Xeons and scoring 1135. IBM also pulls two very high scores from its hat with Intel's Xeon X3360 2.83GHz (1064, 1054), while NEC also posts a high score of 1010 on a Xeon L5420 2.5GHz.
'