AMD processors/-based systems power hunger

[MU_Engineer]

i just try to explain how amd sell hardware

they select the best cores for the opteron CPUs and the to bad for an opteron cores are selled for desktops very cheap.
in europe you can get an 8core opteron for 250€ means not 500dollars
300-400 dollars maybe!

We can get the 8-core Opteron 6128 here for about $270. However, the TDP on the 6128 and all standard-TDP G34 chips is 115 watts. The 80-watt figure is "Average CPU Power," which is supposed to be the highest power consumption "on average workloads." It ended up being roughly similar to Intel's TDP in both numerical values and that the CPUs can certainly exceed them under heavy loads. The tests I've seen have put the actual power consumption of the standard-wattage G34 CPUs at somewhere between the ACP and TDP, so the 115 W TDP chips consume about 100 W at full load. I'd be tempted to agree since my 6128s run slightly warmer at load with similar heatsinks than my file server's old 92-watt "Gallatin" Xeons.

There are 8-core Opterons with 85-watt TDPs, but they are the HE models and cost $455 and $523 for the 6124 HE and 6128 HE, respectively.

your thinking about the GHZ are just wrong

the 8 core opteron have nearly double L3 cache per core than the desktop 6 core
and the 8 core opteron do have quatchannel ram per socked and the desktop one only 2 channel..
means on an modern well optimated sourcecode the opteron beat the desktop one

The G34 Opterons are multi-chip modules consisting of two six-core dies with either four or six cores per die active. Each die is similar to a Phenom II X6 die with 6 MB of L3 cache per die (although 1 MB is claimed by HT Assist and not visible to the OS) and a two-channel DDR3-1333 controller. The two dies in the CPU communicate over an HT link using NUMA, just like a dual Socket F Opteron system. The only way to access all of the chip's resources at once is to have enough threads to have threads running on both dies in the package. The overhead of using NUMA means that the OS will only want to move threads to another die only if there are more threads than cores on the current die. Thus the Opterons really will only be running multi-threaded software faster than the Phenom IIs, since die-for-die and clock-for-clock they are similar in performance, except the G34 Opterons are clocked a whole lot slower. Trust me on this, a friend has a Phenom II X4 920 system that I use with some regularity and I have a dual Opteron 6128 system. The 920 is faster than my 6128s in anything using about 5 threads or fewer.

similar? i call you an liar in that point

thats because my last socket f Opteron with an nforce 3600 pro chip set was worst against the Desktop chipsets

i sell it and now i have an desktop board and now i have less bugs...

I wasn't talking about NVIDIA chipsets that were several generations old, I was talking about the current AMD server and desktop chipsets that are being sold NOW. The 890FX and SR5690 are all reported as RD890 units by lspci and they have very identical specs with regards to PCIe lanes, process technology, and such. The only features that may be different are that the 890FX explicitly supports CrossFire while the SR5690 does not have explicit support for it, although many have gotten it to work. Also, the SR5690 has an IOMMU while most if not all 890FX boards don't have that function or don't have that function exposed by the BIOS.

and you are wrong if you think the amd chipsets on the opteron side are better.

no because the opteron chipsets are fix for 5 years now and the desktop chipsets roll out every year this year the opteron chipsets are nearly the same next year the desktop chipssetzs are better again...

The current Opteron chipsets are pretty much of the same generation as the current desktop ones. They both use derivatives of the 800-series northbridges and SB7x0 derivatives. Oddly enough, the server line were the very first products to use the new 800-series northbridge silicon. Sure, some desktops have the SB800 southbridge, but there's not much on there over the SB7x0-based SP5100 that will interest server buyers.

AMD will also be revamping the Opteron chipset line in 2012 when they release the "Sepang" and "Terramar" Opterons on new sockets with more I/O being controlled on the CPU die rather than by the chipset.

Features like PCIe3.0 or USB3.0 or Sata3

you can not get an opteron board with usb3.0 and pcie3,0 and Sata3

The PCI Express 3.0 standard was only finalized earlier in this month, so nobody has chipsets that provide that functionality yet.

USB 3.0 is not very important to server operators as about the only thing it is used for right now over USB 2.0 is to attach external hard drives. You're typically not going to be doing that to a server. Most servers have only two USB ports on the rear I/O panel compared to 6-10 ports on a desktop, so that should give you an idea as to the importance of any USB ports on servers. Also, if you really needed USB 3.0, you can always add in a USB 3.0 card.

SATA 3.0 from the southbridge also doesn't matter a whole lot since most server operators that need a lot of disk I/O throughput will be using add-in PCI Express controller cards. Those are frequently 6 Gbps SAS units today, which is compatible with 6 Gbps SATA. Quite a few units have the SAS controller onboard, so they really do have the onboard capability to talk to SATA 6 Gbps HDDs. It doesn't matter if the controller is in the southbridge or in another IC connected over PCIe, the boards still have that function.

[crazycheese]

Thanks for your posts, guys!

I'm also aware to large part of (lots of) suggestions and tips given by MU_Engineer, unfortunately they are not the case. Im not using a psu voltmeter to messure. I was using a standard multifunction euro socket meter - similar to this one: http://www.ebreaker.de/images/ab-energiem-01.jpg

It does produce fairly accurate result, when connected over a longer period. Only case was calculated, 40W 24" acer monitor was using separate line.

The problem is that AMD Cpu power hunger is something that is already well known in the world.

The first core2d and second athlon II config were used inside same machine - HDDs, optical, monitor and PSU unchanged.
- The first was dual core e5300, asrock p43me, 2x2gb ddr2-800, gf-9800gt-green(rated at max 75W).
- The second - athlon II x4 630, gigabyte ga-ma785gmt-ud2h(lastest bios), 2x2gb ddr3-1600, rd-hd4770(rated at max 85w).

The psu is 2.5 year old BeQuiet 400W, should be very comparable to enermax in terms of efficiency.

Athlon II x4 has nothing more with PhenomII - the L3 cache is physically absent, it is cut down already in design; not after production. First prototypes were, true, phenoms II with disabled cache, but the ones I possess is not, its Propus core.
-----------
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 16
model : 5
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 630 Processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nonstop_tsc extd_apicid pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save
bogomips : 5625.32
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate
-----------

I think it is highly unprobable that cpu gets overvolted for stability. Why for, when phenom II uses exactly the same Vcc. 6 megabyte of cache are away, why not to drop the voltage...

This is pure craziness if AMD think desktop are unimportant for power efficiency! Look, for example my cpufreqinfo for one of the cores:
------
driver: powernow-k8
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 3
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 3
maximum transition latency: 8.0 us.
hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.80 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.80 GHz, 2.10 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 800 MHz
available cpufreq governors: ondemand, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.80 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 800 MHz.
cpufreq stats: 2.80 GHz:2.12%, 2.10 GHz:0.02%, 1.60 GHz:0.07%, 800 MHz:97.79% (9570)
-------
As you note, unlike server, 97% of time is spent on things that can be done in idle mode anyway. I need the power of four cores much more on-demand (encoding and compiling).

I highly doubt that energy efficiency of topmost priority in server systems.

Also, I too heard, that AMD opteron has 80W not due to "better cores", but due to adding N while, at same time, droping total GHz ratio of CPU - to maintain TDP. And the additional cache is included in the formula as well.

This, combined with previous statement will make Opteron use on my desktop rather unefficient and unused. Well, I dont run server at home(yet), I only need boost of power maybe only some times per day.

Qaridarium, you are living in Germany, no? What is your Stromanbieter? It is normal that extra 60W used 12 hour per day, done for the year, will make €53 extra cost!!

Also, please please look here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/4

You will see now nicely even 8 HT-cored 870 is behaving. The cpu is sleeping if not needed, using all power when required then going into idle again.

The nice new things that I know now (and lots due to your help) are:
-) Intel is selling unlock cards for extra price for low-level intel cpus, to unlock their original performance. Pretty dirty, when a cpu that is capable at running faster with zero cost, is being added to this scheme(implementing which also ADDS extra cost) and the result is then sold at lower price. Pretty dirty.

-) Intel is selling SAS cards on server boards that are also locked! Present, working, using power, but LOCKED unless you purchase the code(600$ or so).

-) AMD sorts out bad cores for desktop, where with Intel you are running server quality(in terms of AMD) cpu on desktop system.

-) AMD uses 2 chip logic, similar to core i7-9xx. This is very probably adding to idle usage..


So from infos you told me, guys, high power drain seems to be combination of:
-) AMD not caring about tighter and accurate voltages (idle and load +)
-) AMD giving worser cores to desktop (idle and load +)
-) Aging 45nm process on CPU and -bridges (idle and load +)
-) PCB using 2 chips, instead of one like on 11xx boards (idle +)
Seems to pretty much apply here..

[BlackStar]

It's simply a matter of trade-offs in CPU design. Performance vs power consumption in a given fab process. Intel is one step ahead here.

AMD releases low-voltage processors that have much lower power consumption, so you might wish to look into that. If you wish to go even lower, you'll need to move into mobile territory (AMD's new Zacate platform is awesome, dual core CPU + GPU in < 18W max power).

Then again, neither Intel nor AMD can hold a candle to ARM in power consumption.

[MU_Engineer]

The first core2d and second athlon II config were used inside same machine - HDDs, optical, monitor and PSU unchanged.
- The first was dual core e5300, asrock p43me, 2x2gb ddr2-800, gf-9800gt-green(rated at max 75W).
- The second - athlon II x4 630, gigabyte ga-ma785gmt-ud2h(lastest bios), 2x2gb ddr3-1600, rd-hd4770(rated at max 85w).

The psu is 2.5 year old BeQuiet 400W, should be very comparable to enermax in terms of efficiency.

If I were you, I'd put the 9800GT in the Athlon II system or the HD 4770 in the Intel system and see how that affects the readings. That's the largest variable that is unrelated to the CPU and can be directly isolated, so I would definitely do that if you still have the parts.

I think it is highly unprobable that cpu gets overvolted for stability. Why for, when phenom II uses exactly the same Vcc. 6 megabyte of cache are away, why not to drop the voltage...

Cache doesn't use nearly as much power as logic, especially when the L3 cache runs at a completely different (and lower) speed and voltage. Phenom II L3 caches use somewhere right around 1.00 V and run at 1.80-2.00 GHz, compared to 1.35-1.40 V and 2.60-3.50 GHz for the cores. Your Athlon II X4 has virtually the same amount of logic as a Phenom II X4 and it is made on the same process and stepping, so I would expect the core voltage to be the same as a Phenom II. I do agree AMD is really over-speccing voltage, but it's very frequently and relatively easily correctable by the user like you have said.

This is pure craziness if AMD think desktop are unimportant for power efficiency!

I highly doubt that energy efficiency of topmost priority in server systems.

It actually is a top priority. Just look at what's on the front of an Opteron box:



If energy efficiency weren't a priority, why would they put "Outstanding performance per watt" on the front of their box instead of "Outstanding performance" or "Outstanding performance for the price?"

Also, I too heard, that AMD opteron has 80W not due to "better cores", but due to adding N while, at same time, droping total GHz ratio of CPU - to maintain TDP. And the additional cache is included in the formula as well.

The biggest reason the Opterons can have that many cores and still have the same TDP as desktop chips is that their clock speed is so much slower. The lower clock speed in itself will lead to a lower thermal dissipation. But it really comes from the fact that you don't need as much voltage to drive a chip at ~2 GHz as you do as ~3 GHz, and the thermal dissipation increases linearly with clock speed but with the square of voltage. So if you can drop the voltage to 90% of what you had before, your chip will consume 81% as much power as before with everything else being equal.

This, combined with previous statement will make Opteron use on my desktop rather unefficient and unused. Well, I dont run server at home(yet), I only need boost of power maybe only some times per day.

Opterons idle at 800 MHz and the standard-voltage ones use right about 1.000 V at idle. The HE ones use less voltage and the EE ones less yet. However, the e-series Athlon IIs with a 45-watt TDP also have a lower idle voltage than your standard 95-watt unit.

The nice new things that I know now (and lots due to your help) are:
-) Intel is selling unlock cards for extra price for low-level intel cpus, to unlock their original performance. Pretty dirty, when a cpu that is capable at running faster with zero cost, is being added to this scheme(implementing which also ADDS extra cost) and the result is then sold at lower price. Pretty dirty.

-) Intel is selling SAS cards on server boards that are also locked! Present, working, using power, but LOCKED unless you purchase the code(600$ or so).

Intel locks a lot of their stuff, this is nothing new. No Core i-series supports ECC RAM, the i5 7xx series have HyperThreading locked off, some of the lower-end i-series chips have no Turbo Boost or virtualization, and many of the Xeons have cache locked off, cores locked off, HyperThreading and Turbo Boost locked off, and the RAM and QPI speeds limited.

-) AMD sorts out bad cores for desktop, where with Intel you are running server quality(in terms of AMD) cpu on desktop system.

Yes, if only because Intel's desktop chips tend to be less-locked than their server counterparts and AMD doesn't lock anything besides cores on their Opterons.

-) AMD uses 2 chip logic, similar to core i7-9xx. This is very probably adding to idle usage..

It also leads to greater I/O capacity and performance. The lower-capability AMD northbridges use less power than the higher-capability ones, so go for something very basic like the 870 northbridge if you want a minimal power draw.

[Qaridarium]

We can get the 8-core Opteron 6128 here for about $270. However, the TDP on the 6128 and all standard-TDP G34 chips is 115 watts. The 80-watt figure is "Average CPU Power," which is supposed to be the highest power consumption "on average workloads." It ended up being roughly similar to Intel's TDP in both numerical values and that the CPUs can certainly exceed them under heavy loads. The tests I've seen have put the actual power consumption of the standard-wattage G34 CPUs at somewhere between the ACP and TDP, so the 115 W TDP chips consume about 100 W at full load. I'd be tempted to agree since my 6128s run slightly warmer at load with similar heatsinks than my file server's old 92-watt "Gallatin" Xeons.
There are 8-core Opterons with 85-watt TDPs, but they are the HE models and cost $455 and $523 for the 6124 HE and 6128 HE, respectively.

well yes.. but my point is true any opteron beat an desktop dualcore cpu in performance per watt usage

The G34 Opterons are multi-chip modules consisting of two six-core dies with either four or six cores per die active. Each die is similar to a Phenom II X6 die with 6 MB of L3 cache per die (although 1 MB is claimed by HT Assist and not visible to the OS)

you can turn of the ht assist in the bios

not all apps run faster with ht assist in my point of view ht assist is a benchmark feature for syntetic benchmarks

and a two-channel DDR3-1333 controller. The two dies in the CPU communicate over an HT link using NUMA, just like a dual Socket F Opteron system. The only way to access all of the chip's resources at once is to have enough threads to have threads running on both dies in the package. The overhead of using NUMA means that the OS will only want to move threads to another die only if there are more threads than cores on the current die. Thus the Opterons really will only be running multi-threaded software faster than the Phenom IIs, since die-for-die and clock-for-clock they are similar in performance, except the G34 Opterons are clocked a whole lot slower. Trust me on this, a friend has a Phenom II X4 920 system that I use with some regularity and I have a dual Opteron 6128 system. The 920 is faster than my 6128s in anything using about 5 threads or fewer.

not anything is about raw speed the opteron is abaut latency in an game like ARMA2 an Opteron system do have much better Latency time

means if the systems runs slower because of the first theat is slowed down by the 2ghz overall the system reacts faster than the PhenomII system with more fps...

fore FPS or reacting faster i prever the reacting faster

thats because of the parralell ram latency 4 channels do have less parraell latency than 2 channels.

I wasn't talking about NVIDIA chipsets that were several generations old, I was talking about the current AMD server and desktop chipsets that are being sold NOW. The 890FX and SR5690 are all reported as RD890 units by lspci and they have very identical specs with regards to PCIe lanes, process technology, and such. The only features that may be different are that the 890FX explicitly supports CrossFire while the SR5690 does not have explicit support for it, although many have gotten it to work. Also, the SR5690 has an IOMMU while most if not all 890FX boards don't have that function or don't have that function exposed by the BIOS.

right now wait 6 monds or so then the desktop boards do have better chipsets again ...

The current Opteron chipsets are pretty much of the same generation as the current desktop ones. They both use derivatives of the 800-series northbridges and SB7x0 derivatives. Oddly enough, the server line were the very first products to use the new 800-series northbridge silicon. Sure, some desktops have the SB800 southbridge, but there's not much on there over the SB7x0-based SP5100 that will interest server buyers.

in clear words right now the desktop is better

maybe because of the sata3

AMD will also be revamping the Opteron chipset line in 2012 when they release the "Sepang" and "Terramar" Opterons on new sockets with more I/O being controlled on the CPU die rather than by the chipset.

yes 2012... means 2011 the desktop chipsets beat the server chipsets again...

The PCI Express 3.0 standard was only finalized earlier in this month, so nobody has chipsets that provide that functionality yet.

yet is an very danger word in the computer world the yet can be over every minute--

USB 3.0 is not very important to server operators as about the only thing it is used for right now over USB 2.0 is to attach external hard drives. You're typically not going to be doing that to a server. Most servers have only two USB ports on the rear I/O panel compared to 6-10 ports on a desktop, so that should give you an idea as to the importance of any USB ports on servers. Also, if you really needed USB 3.0, you can always add in a USB 3.0 card.

opterons are not only used by server think about workstations

SATA 3.0 from the southbridge also doesn't matter a whole lot since most server operators that need a lot of disk I/O throughput will be using add-in PCI Express controller cards. Those are frequently 6 Gbps SAS units today, which is compatible with 6 Gbps SATA. Quite a few units have the SAS controller onboard, so they really do have the onboard capability to talk to SATA 6 Gbps HDDs. It doesn't matter if the controller is in the southbridge or in another IC connected over PCIe, the boards still have that function.

it does matter i know tests that the latency over the southbridge is better than over an PCIe card.

so you buy an SSD for faster latency then you burn the latency over the PCIe bus LOL.. FAIL

[Qaridarium]

aridarium, you are living in Germany, no? What is your Stromanbieter? It is normal that extra 60W used 12 hour per day, done for the year, will make €53 extra cost!!

yes in germany power consuming is expensiv

but your thinking about amd burn my money is wrong right now i have an OC-E6600@3,6ghz with Idle 160watt consuming...

my last Opteron system with quatcore only burns 140watt in idle

last week we chance the "stromanbieter"

but we have a 10Kw Solarpowerplant and we have a 5kw gas combined heat and power Power station at home

and i do not pay for power consuming

[MU_Engineer]

well yes.. but my point is true any opteron beat an desktop dualcore cpu in performance per watt usage

It all depends on what exact chips you're comparing and what you are testing for a program.

you can turn of the ht assist in the bios

not all apps run faster with ht assist in my point of view ht assist is a benchmark feature for syntetic benchmarks

You can't turn off HT Assist on all platforms, nor would you want to. My dual G34 board doesn't have the option to turn off HT Assist, and from what I've read, you would want to leave HT Assist turned on for all platforms with more than two dies. A dual G34 has four, which is probably why the board has it on all of the time.

not anything is about raw speed the opteron is abaut latency in an game like ARMA2 an Opteron system do have much better Latency time

means if the systems runs slower because of the first theat is slowed down by the 2ghz overall the system reacts faster than the PhenomII system with more fps...

Not when you have a Phenom II X4 or X6 on a game with only two or three heavy threads like most common games have today. You have unused cores in all cases, except the Phenom II ones are clocked considerably higher and thus give better performance.

fore FPS or reacting faster i prever the reacting faster

thats because of the parralell ram latency 4 channels do have less parraell latency than 2 channels.

No. G34 Opterons are MCM units with two dies. Each die has only two RAM channels, so the "four-channel" interface is really two channels + two channels accessed off-die over NUMA. Going through the HT link to the other die, retrieving the data from RAM, and then coming back to the original die takes longer than a local RAM access. The advantage to the extra memory channels would be if you simply need a lot of bandwidth, but most tests for desktop apps I've seen show little improvement in performance with higher RAM speed once you're using DDR3-1066. Most Phenom II systems have at least DDR3-1333, so you're not hurting for RAM bandwidth.

right now wait 6 monds or so then the desktop boards do have better chipsets again ...

You mean the 900-series chipsets that are supposed to have nearly the exact same specs as the existing 800-series ones? They don't have USB 3.0 onboard, nor PCI Express 3.0, nor do they add any more PCIe lanes or anything like that.

in clear words right now the desktop is better

maybe because of the sata3

Says somebody who's never used much for a disk subsystem on a southbridge. Southbridge-based SATA controllers are not all that great at handling a lot of disk I/O compared to discrete PCIe disk controllers. This is especially true on NVIDIA's SATA controllers such as the one in your NF3600 unit. Besides, server boards with onboard SAS/SATA 6 Gbps controllers are widespread and have good PCIe-linked controller ICs that greatly outperform AMD's SB800 SATA controller.

yes 2012... means 2011 the desktop chipsets beat the server chipsets again...

They only "beat" them in largely meaningless ways.

yet is an very danger word in the computer world the yet can be over every minute--

No. There is a pretty well-known period of time required for product development. If somebody started on a PCIe 3.0 chipset today, industry people could pretty well predict when it would get to market, and the rumor mill will pick it up well before we see shipping parts. So it's not "can be over any minute," it's "will be over sometime at least several months from now."

opterons are not only used by server think about workstations

AMD has publicly said it will not concentrate on the workstation market any more; workstation users can use server parts. Quite a few server parts generally don't require too much tweaking to become good workstations. They usually come with a lot of PCIe I/O and slots, so you can very easily add in a $30 USB 3.0 card if it is THAT important to you. Ditto with a 6 Gbps SATA controller. Using desktop parts as a workstation is much harder as there are very few desktop boards that support something as simple as ECC RAM, and every last new one of those is an AMD board and only one vendor sells them (ASUS.) Desktop boards either tend to be cheap or loaded up with lamer-gamer gimmicks like a remote control to adjust your overclock rather than having reliability features needed in a workstation.

it does matter i know tests that the latency over the southbridge is better than over an PCIe card.

Are you certain about that? AMD's southbridges connect to the northbridge over a PCI Express x4 link. That's all the A-Link Express is, a PCI Express link. I highly doubt that the latency to the southbridge over those PCIe lanes is much if any different than the latency to an expansion card over other PCIe lanes.

so you buy an SSD for faster latency then you burn the latency over the PCIe bus LOL.. FAIL

So oh my god, you may have to wait a few nanoseconds longer for data! I sure hope you don't have any magnetic disks in your system, else you're waiting for millions of painful nanoseconds to get data off of those! Ditto with getting anything off the Internet. You have to wait tens to hundreds of thousands of nanoseconds just to get a reply from a Web server. Maybe you should get a Killer NIC to help you out with that, huh?

[Qaridarium]

It all depends on what exact chips you're comparing and what you are testing for a program.

7zip,x264 encoding,arma2,surprime commander for exampel

arma2 needs 12 cores and 64gb ram and you can not put 64gb ram into an Phenom2 system

You can't turn off HT Assist on all platforms, nor would you want to. My dual G34 board doesn't have the option to turn off HT Assist, and from what I've read, you would want to leave HT Assist turned on for all platforms with more than two dies. A dual G34 has four, which is probably why the board has it on all of the time.

well if i buy an g34 socked board it will be a supermicro single socket board.

and then i can turn of that feature withour any hurt

Not when you have a Phenom II X4 or X6 on a game with only two or three heavy threads like most common games have today. You have unused cores in all cases, except the Phenom II ones are clocked considerably higher and thus give better performance.

the opteron can win if an app use at minimum 4 cores because of the higher ram bandwith on 4 theats

No. G34 Opterons are MCM units with two dies. Each die has only two RAM channels, so the "four-channel" interface is really two channels + two channels accessed off-die over NUMA. Going through the HT link to the other die, retrieving the data from RAM, and then coming back to the original die takes longer than a local RAM access. The advantage to the extra memory channels would be if you simply need a lot of bandwidth, but most tests for desktop apps I've seen show little improvement in performance with higher RAM speed once you're using DDR3-1066. Most Phenom II systems have at least DDR3-1333, so you're not hurting for RAM bandwidth.

with an phenomII you can use at max 1600mhz ddr3 dimms

1600*2 vs 1333*4 means the opteron is faster

and the ram latency goes down if you have parrell tasks if 4 tasks ask for an ram request the phenomII do this seriel and the opteron can handle 4 ram requests at the same time on differend tasks..

You mean the 900-series chipsets that are supposed to have nearly the exact same specs as the existing 800-series ones? They don't have USB 3.0 onboard, nor PCI Express 3.0, nor do they add any more PCIe lanes or anything like that.

i think the 900 series consumes less power

means the desktop chipset wins again..-

Says somebody who's never used much for a disk subsystem on a southbridge. Southbridge-based SATA controllers are not all that great at handling a lot of disk I/O compared to discrete PCIe disk controllers. This is especially true on NVIDIA's SATA controllers such as the one in your NF3600 unit. Besides, server boards with onboard SAS/SATA 6 Gbps controllers are widespread and have good PCIe-linked controller ICs that greatly outperform AMD's SB800 SATA controller.
They only "beat" them in largely meaningless ways.
No. There is a pretty well-known period of time required for product development. If somebody started on a PCIe 3.0 chipset today, industry people could pretty well predict when it would get to market, and the rumor mill will pick it up well before we see shipping parts. So it's not "can be over any minute," it's "will be over sometime at least several months from now."
AMD has publicly said it will not concentrate on the workstation market any more; workstation users can use server parts. Quite a few server parts generally don't require too much tweaking to become good workstations. They usually come with a lot of PCIe I/O and slots, so you can very easily add in a $30 USB 3.0 card if it is THAT important to you. Ditto with a 6 Gbps SATA controller. Using desktop parts as a workstation is much harder as there are very few desktop boards that support something as simple as ECC RAM, and every last new one of those is an AMD board and only one vendor sells them (ASUS.) Desktop boards either tend to be cheap or loaded up with lamer-gamer gimmicks like a remote control to adjust your overclock rather than having reliability features needed in a workstation.
Are you certain about that? AMD's southbridges connect to the northbridge over a PCI Express x4 link. That's all the A-Link Express is, a PCI Express link. I highly doubt that the latency to the southbridge over those PCIe lanes is much if any different than the latency to an expansion card over other PCIe lanes.
So oh my god, you may have to wait a few nanoseconds longer for data! I sure hope you don't have any magnetic disks in your system, else you're waiting for millions of painful nanoseconds to get data off of those! Ditto with getting anything off the Internet. You have to wait tens to hundreds of thousands of nanoseconds just to get a reply from a Web server. Maybe you should get a Killer NIC to help you out with that, huh?

i never run any servers. i only interested in the opterons because of the gread workstation useages and gaming usages.

means i don't care about your SAS hdd stuff over an PCIe lane

in my point of view the opteron6000 series beats the desktop one on the RAM side you can have 32/64gb of ram with normal desktop ddr3 'rams'

means you can play an streaming game like arma2 in an ramdrive withour reload stuttering

[movieman]

an 3,5" hdd consums 15-20watt an SSD only 0,5 watt.

No it doesn't, with the possible exception of initial spin-up when booting. My 40GB SSD is actually rated as higher power consumption when writing than my 2TB HDD... of course because it doesn't rotate and have long seek times it spends very little time writing and most of the time idle.

[MU_Engineer]

7zip,x264 encoding,arma2,surprime commander for exampel

x264 encoding certainly does use a lot of cores, and so can some file compression programs. Other than those, there aren't too many that you'd run on a desktop that are highly multithreaded. There are a ton of workstation applications like CFD, molecular modeling, 3D rendering, and code compilation that are thread-heavy, but they're not desktop applications. The only game I know of that uses a boatload of CPU cores is Microsoft Flight Simulator. There may be more, but most use one to three "heavy" threads and that's about it.

arma2 needs 12 cores and 64gb ram and you can not put 64gb ram into an Phenom2 system

No. I don't have the game, but I am pretty sure it does not need 12 cores or 64 GB of RAM to run. First of all, the only people that could even run it would be running at a bare minimum an Opteron 6168 with all eight RAM slots filled. That's a $750 chip and 8 GB DIMMs cost $220 a pop. Requiring the user to spend over $3000 on hardware just to play the game is a recipe for nobody buying the game. Secondly, the recommended hardware from the publisher says an A64 4400+ or faster with 2 GB of RAM. That's a far cry from 12 cores and 64 GB.

well if i buy an g34 socked board it will be a supermicro single socket board.

and then i can turn of that feature withour any hurt

Why would you do that? The big advantage of Socket G34 systems are their ability to be run in multiprocessor systems and secondly to provide four dies' worth of cores on an EATX/SSI EEB -sized system. A single G34 will be slower than an equivalently-priced dual C32 setup and have no more RAM bandwidth or memory capacity. You can even get dual C32 systems in a standard ATX format (ASUS KCMA-D8), so there's really no reason to go single G34 over dual C32s.

the opteron can win if an app use at minimum 4 cores because of the higher ram bandwith on 4 theats

Like I said above, very few if any desktop applications besides RAM benchmarks are bottlenecked by two channels of DDR3-1333 on a Phenom II X4. A Phenom II X4 is going to be quite a bit faster running four threads than a G34 Opteron running at 50-80% the clockspeed of the Phenom II. Anyway, your precious latency is much higher in going off-die to a remote NUMA node for memory access than in having local memory access. Thus the scheduler will keep all of the threads on one of the G34's dies until it has more than 4 or 6 threads, and then it will start scheduling some on the other die.

with an phenomII you can use at max 1600mhz ddr3 dimms

1600*2 vs 1333*4 means the opteron is faster

Yes, Opterons have higher platform bandwidth. But as I keep saying, DESKTOP APPLICATIONS ARE GENERALLY NOT RAM-BANDWIDTH-LIMITED.

and the ram latency goes down if you have parrell tasks if 4 tasks ask for an ram request the phenomII do this seriel and the opteron can handle 4 ram requests at the same time on differend tasks..

No, RAM latency would probably go up in that case. In a Phenom II system, the processes simply look in the caches to see if data is there and then get queued up to retrieve data from RAM if the data is not in cache. A multiprocessor NUMA system involves snooping of both local and remote caches (although HT Assist helps with this) as well as potentially having to retrieve data from remote dies over HT, all of which adds latency. Thus it is no surprise that any NUMA scheduler worth a crap is trying hard to keep data in RAM local to the die the thread is running on to minimize latency, which means you're only getting that die's dual-channel IMC's bandwidth for the most part.

i think the 900 series consumes less power

means the desktop chipset wins again..-

I heard it's similar if not identical, but I can't find any authoritative source that says one way or another.

i never run any servers. i only interested in the opterons because of the gread workstation useages and gaming usages.

means i don't care about your SAS hdd stuff over an PCIe lane

Apparently you do, since you were whining about there being no 6 Gbps SATA support in the SP5100 server southbridge. That 6 Gbps SAS controller also does 6 Gbps SATA as well (SATA 3.0), and will handle more HDD aggregate bandwidth than any southbridge controller.

in my point of view the opteron6000 series beats the desktop one on the RAM side you can have 32/64gb of ram with normal desktop ddr3 'rams'

Yes, but only an idiot would run that much non-ECC RAM in a system that supports ECC. I guess not having ECC in the RAM would make a desktop user feel right at home, since you can't overclock current Opteron gear and the boards are made to be more reliable than standard desktop gear. Something has to take the place of flaky overclocked CPUs and cheap components causing errors to require frequent reboots, so I guess RAM errors are as good of a reason as any.

means you can play an streaming game like arma2 in an ramdrive withour reload stuttering

Yes, until the game crashes on you because you have a ton of non-ECC RAM in the system and a bit got flipped somewhere, corrupting the game data in that RAM.

Also, game level load times are usually only a handful of seconds. Are you as impatient as this kid when it comes to load times?