A Comparison of Single-Core and Dual-Core Opteron Processor Performance for

Dual-core AMD Opteron ™ processors represent the latest significant development in microprocessor technology. In this paper, using the IBM ® eServer ™ 326, we examine the performance of dual-core Opteron processors. We measure the core performance under ideal work loads using the Linpack HPL benchmark, and show it to be 60 % faster than the fastest single-core Opteron. We measure unloaded memory latency and show that the dual-core processor’s slower clock frequency makes the latency longer. However, we also show that its memory throughput is 10 % greater than single-core processors. Finally, we show that dual-core Opteron processors offer a significant performance advantage even on realistic applications, such as those represented by the SPEC ® CPU2000 benchmark suite. 1