Intel Xeon 5150 Woodcrest Performance

Since AMD had launched their Opteron series three years ago, Intel has had a greater challenge in the workstation and server environment. The competition between Intel and AMD will only stiffen as Advanced Micro Devices launches their Socket F LGA-1207 package for Opteron processors in the middle of August. However, to fight this competition coming out of Intel just weeks ago was Woodcrest. Intel's Woodcrest is a dual-core product and is found in the Xeon 5100 series. Woodcrest is a close server variant to the recently released Conroe desktop component for the Core 2 Duo processors, which we had offered a technical preview of earlier this month. Intel's Xeon 5100 series shares the Bensley platform with the dual-core Dempsey, which we have also examined extensively at Phoronix.

While the Intel Xeon 5080 boasts an operating frequency of 3.73GHz, the fastest Woodcrest (Xeon 5160) runs only at 3.00GHz. As we had brought up in our Core 2 Duo article, Intel is no longer focusing on the frequency race, but they are working on vastly improving other areas of the architecture as well. Some of the benefits for the Intel Xeon 5100 series includes 4MB of shared L2 cache between the two cores, 1333MHz FSB, 65W TDP (excluding the 5148 LV), and 65nm manufacturing. Unlike the Dempsey, Woodcrest does not support Hyper-Threading but it does support Intel VT, EM64T, and Execute Disable Bit.

Intel's present Xeon 5100 selection consists of the 5110, 5120, 5130, 5140, 5148 LV, 5150, and 5160. The two Intel Woodcrest processors we will be using for today's small performance round-up is the Xeon 5150. The Intel Xeon 5150 comes clocked at a competitive 2.66GHz. For comparison purposes was the Intel Xeon 5060 and 5080 that come clocked at 3.20GHz and 3.73GHz respectively. The motherboard used for our testing was the Tyan Tempest i5000XL, which has proved to be a phenomenal motherboard from the two months we have spent with it thus far. The Tempest i5000XL is based on the Intel Greencreek Chipset and offers DDR2 FB-DIMM support along with PCI Express x16.

For the CPU benchmarking we had used Enemy Territory, Doom 3, LAME Compilation, LAME Encoding, Blue Sail Software Opstone, FreeBench, and RAMspeed. As usual, the standard Phoronix benchmarking practices were in effect while testing all of these Intel Xeon processors. On the following pages are our results from the Intel Xeon 5060, 5080, 5150, and dual 5150 processors.