AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs On Linux

Moving onto GCC compilation testing we first timed how long it took to compile Apache 2.2.8. With one Opteron 2356 it took 45 seconds on average while with two Barcelona CPUs it took 38 seconds. Switching over to Shanghai, one CPU took 34 seconds but when occupying both sockets on the Tyan Thunder n3600M we were able to compile Apache in just 27 seconds. For those unfamiliar with the Phoronix Test Suite operations, the number of jobs specified during the compilation tests is automatically set to twice the number of available CPU cores.

With it taking longer to compile ImageMagick than Apache, more sizable performance gains were experienced with dual CPUs. Like the other tests thus far, Shanghai was much faster than the Barcelona even when factoring in the frequency difference.

The power of eight cores was quite dramatic with the 2GB file compression performance through Parallel BZIP2 (PBZIP2). However, the Shanghai didn't end up being much faster than the Barcelona in either the single or dual CPU configurations.