Performance of the AMD Opteron LS21 for IBM BladeCenter

Overview

This paper examines the performance of the AMD Opteron LS21 for IBM BladeCenter, or LS21. The analysis includes memory bandwidth and latency using Stream and a proprietary benchmark, floating-point vector performance using High Performance Linpack (HPL) and performance of the SPEC CPU2000 speed and rate benchmarks. The real value proposition of the LS21 is its small form factor, ease of management and low-power consumption, at which the LS21 excels. So the question that the authors endeavored to answer is "Was performance sacrificed in the designing of this blade?" The findings presented in this paper demonstrate that, even with a processor speed limit of 2.6 GHz instead of 2.8 GHz, performance was in no way sacrificed.