IT Week Labs tests show that AMD's 64bit Opteron processor runs encryption software 10 percent faster than Intel's 1.3GHz 64bit Itanium 2 with 3MB cache, codenamed Madison.
The Opteron was launched in April but very few systems have been delivered to customers for evaluation. Madison was launched three weeks ago.
Our benchmarks show the Opteron 244 processor provides superior performance on compute-intensive tasks, such as the Gnu Privacy Guard encryption used in our tests. The news means even future versions of Itanium 2 may not be significantly faster than future Opterons.
We tested the processors by measuring how long they took to encrypt a 185MB file.
The Itanium system was an HP zx6000 dual-processor workstation fitted with three Ultra320 SCSI disks, 4GB RAM and running Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation 2.1.
The Opteron system was an Armari RM-O64-1AE server fitted with dual 1.8GHz processors, each with 1MB of cache, 8GB RAM, a single IDE drive and running SuSe Linux 8 Enterprise Server.
All tests used the chips' 64bit modes. Other IT Week Labs tests also revealed that AMD's new chips run x86 software at about the same speed as a 2.4GHz Xeon processor.
