A comparison of the Intel Itanium 2 and the advanced micro devices Opteron processors

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Intel RTM ItaniumRTM 2 and the Advanced Micro Devices Opteron(TM) processors in the context of 2 specific benchmarks relevant to the high performance scientific and technical computing community. The Stream micro-benchmark was used to focus on the ability of the processors to execute numerical kernels, while MSC.Nastran, an industry-standard finite element analysis program, was used to establish a context for kernel performance.; The specific instruction set architecture features that result in very strong floating point and memory bandwidth performance by Itanium 2 in the STREAM micro-benchmark generally allow the processor to outperform Opteron(TM) on the total computational load of MSC.Nastran, even in the face of the Opteron(TM) processor's greater integer performance and multi-processor scalability.