AMD Shanghai Opteron: Linux vs. OpenSolaris Benchmarks

In January we published a review of the AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs on Linux when we looked at four of the Opteron 2384 models. The performance of these 45nm quad-core workstation/server processors were great when compared to the earlier AMD Barcelona processors on Ubuntu Linux, but how is their performance when running Sun's OpenSolaris operating system? Up for viewing today are dual AMD Shanghai benchmarks when running OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10, and a daily build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release.

The AMD Opteron 2384 is clocked at 2.70GHz and for more information on the benefits of the Shanghai processors, read our article from last month. For this testing we used the Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard once again with 4GB of Corsair DDR2-667 ECC Registered memory, 160GB Western Digital WD1600YS-01SHB1 Serial ATA hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX 512MB graphics card. The operating systems up for testing were OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64, and an Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 daily spin from 2009-01-28.

To recap the Ubuntu 8.10 packages, it ships with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, GCC 4.3.2, and was using the EXT3 file-system. Our build of Ubuntu 9.04 was depending upon the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.25.5, X Server 1.6.0 RC 1, GCC 4.3.3, and we opted to use the EXT4 file-system. OpenSolaris 2008.11 is based upon Solaris Nevada Build 101b, uses the 5.11 kernel with X Server 1.3, GCC 3.4.3, and the ZFS file-system. During all operating system testing we were using the NVIDIA 180.22 display driver.

All tests on Ubuntu Linux and OpenSolaris were run through the Phoronix Test Suite. The tests we chose to run that were compatible with both Linux and OpenSolaris were LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, timed PHP compilation, 7-Zip compression, Gzip compression, GnuPG, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, BYTE Unix Benchmark, SQLite, Sunflow Rendering System, Bork File Encrypter, and Java SciMark.