Over at The Inquirer you can take a look at the performance of the Opteron 6274 as a server chip, as opposed to the desktop benchmarks that have made up the bulk of Bulldozer reviews on the web.  SuperMicro has assembled a server containing a dual-socket Opteron 6274 for a total of 32 cores and 64GB of ECC DDR3-1333 RAM across eight channels running on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.  While the machine was quite powerful it still has difficulty keeping up with Intel, for instance its performance on CineBench was about the same as provided by an X5680 Westmere Xeon which is not Intel’s best silicon. On the plus side, the scaling for multithreaded applications was quite good.

"IS BULLDOZER better in a workstation than a desktop? Let’s see if it can be.

AMD’s Bulldozer chip, while eagerly awaited, didn’t really have a stellar debut as a mainstream – or high end, for that matter – desktop processor, still having a way to go before seriously challenging the incumbent Intel. The core, cache and memory performance all need a bit more power, although recent news such as Microsoft Windows’ kernel patches do seem to help a little bit towards extracting more oomph from the unusual ‘two integer units sharing one floating-point’ approach."

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