So, having just built my home machine I wanted to test this (1x Quad 2.83 Ghz) against 1) my work desktop machine with equivalent processors but Xeon (so server chips instead of desktop chips; 2x Quad 3 Ghz) and then I wanted to test against someone’s new Nehalem Xeon server chips (2x Quad 2.66 Ghz processors).The server machines have 8GB DDR 3 RAM and the home computer has 4 GB DDR 2 RAm.
I am testing these against standard phylogenetics programs as they are my interest. Therefore, these benchmarks don’t speak to how well the processors work for games, conversion, compression, and other standard benchmark analyses.
I will have more detailed results up later, but testing against my own serial (non-parallel) program they are all about equivalent with the Nehalem chip being about 13% faster.
When testing again 3.1.2 MrBayes MPI version with 4 threads allowed on each machine, again, they are fairly equivalent. Differences are relatively negligible and similar to the non-parallel results.
However, when testing against the PTHREADS-SSE3 version of RAxML (7.2.2) I find large differences (again, allowing every machine to use 4 cores). If we use my home machine as the benchmark, it can do a particular analysis in 1200 seconds. The work computer with server chips runs the same dataset in about 900 seconds. This is probably due to cache issues and other things done better in server chips. The new Nehalem processors do the same dataset in 600 secs. So 1.5 times faster than the previous Xeon chips and twice as fast as the home computer! This is where the Nehalems shine, PTHREADS, or in other words, very tight parallelization.
Of course, they may shine in other types of analyses, but for phylogenetics software crunching numbers, this is where I have found the advantage.
