I am working on a multithreaded application (Forex trading app built on C#) and had the client upgrade from the 12 core 3.0GHZ machine (Intel) to a 32 core 2.2 Ghz machine (AMD). The PassMark benchmark results were significantly higher when using multicores doing Integer, Floating and other calculations while for a single core calculation it was a bit slower than the pack (others that were being compared to with similar config as the 12 core one). Oh it also comes with 64 GB RAM (4 times as the other one) and a much faster SSD.
So after configuring and running the application on that machine, not only did it not perform as well, it was significantly slower. We're talking about 30seconds - 1 minute slower on an app that usually completes processing within 5-20 secs. The application uses MAX DEGREE of PARALLELISM (TPL) which I've tried setting to number of cores and also half of that. I've also tried running single threaded and without setting any limits in parallel threading.
While it may be the hardware has some issues, I am wondering if the CPU processing speed is the issue. I can overclock to 3.0 GHZ. But is that even a good idea?
Server Info -
AMD http://www.passmark.com/forum/showthread.php?4013-AMD-Dual-6272-performance-is-60-lower-than-benchmarks Seems that benchmark was wrong to start with - officially.
Intel i7 3930k
OS (same in both) Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Related issue - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7747573/net-performance-on-amd-processor
EDIT I see a lot of useful information. I want to modify the question slightly now - Forget the Intel processor for now. What can be done with the AMD system to get more out of it? We're working on profiling. We've had a DBA look into the indexing, fragmentation and other parameters like I/O usages. There seems to be a lot more reads and writes than in the Intel based CPU. I saw an answer on AMD based optimization. Is there a way to do this other than use OpenCL? How about overclocking? Would that cook the CPU? In terms of owning up - I see people kind of pissed off at me! The PC was on sale and boss and I discussed if the resources available (4 times more RAM, almost 3 times as many CPUs and a lot faster driver SSD) would help us gain a lot of performance. We're always looking to tune it from the software end, except it hasn't (I won't say didn't) turned out to be that magical bang for the buck we were looking/hoping for. I do feel every bit miserable about this - thus the lengthy post.
More Edit I just wish some AMD rep would say this is bull**** You're doing it the wrong way! You've overlooked this and haven't used this feature.. To make matters worse I read that AMD's made huge losses this year and are waiting on a bailout. :(