I thought AMD predominantly used a compiler built by Portland Group?

> see Anand or Techreport

You could as well say: see Intel's web page. Maybe you did not notice but reports on that pages are totaly biased toward Intel. For example in price/watt article on Anand, he put 7 coolers in AMD machine and 3 in Intel one (and intel heat is diss. is much more than AMD), also 8Gb in AMD and 4 GB in Intel in tests where huge RAM is not important (and everyone knows that intel eats energy when added 4Gb more).

Conclustion: dont trust sites where 60% of site is covered with Intel adds, and at bottom of the each article you have link to Intel site. If you continue to read that **** you will eventualy buy Intel and get garbage which costs 30% more than similar/better AMD platform/chip.

It's how fast the machine can do floating point calculations (ie: floating point performance). Yes, neither "ar" nor "Venatici" know what they're talking about.

Specifically, they run N copies of some benchmark at once (N being the number of cores in the machine), time how long it takes to finish, and then take the reciprocal (and multiply by a constant to give a particular machine a rate of 1). To get a non-rate number, you can more or less just divide by the number of cores. The only way to "cheat" on a rate number is to have more cores than the competitor (two quad core Opterons vs two dual-core Xeons), but that's not the case here (both are quad core).

Now, on to the interesting bits ... it's amazing how poorly Clovertown scales with clock speed. Despite a 50% increase in clock speed, the performance only goes up by 18%. This suggests that it's not the CPUs holding the system back, it's either the FSB or the memory. Given the huge (relative) performance hit the E5320 takes, I'd say it's the FSB. Looking at the green camp, Barcelona scales nearly perfectly going from 1.9 GHz to 2.0 GHz.

So, what about Harpertown? Real-world benchmarks so far show that Harpertown outdoes Clovertown (in a 2S system, running MP-capable benchmarks) by ~10% at 3 GHz. This would give Intel's 3.2 GHz Harpertown a specfp base rate of about 74, which is far different from the 86.3 they are claiming. So Intel's definately found a tweak to pull a lot higher specfp rate score, quite probably SSE4. This 74 number is more or less what a 2 GHz Barcelona gets, which suggests that for non-SSE4 apps (ie: most fp apps already released and to be released in the next year or two), a 2 GHz Barcelona will still be competitive with a 3.2 GHz Harpertown.

Finally, int performance is quite dissapointing, and a real concern. Barcelona market placement is going to be server-centric for a good while, and if it can't compete there then it's a big problem. On the other hand, Clovertown doesn't exhibit poor scaling in int, and Harpertown doesn't really add much in the way of integer performance, so AMD's got a little while to fix things up.

> What exactly is floating point throughput?
In engligh, throughput is exactly that - it measures how big your pipe is. Since in this test they are running N copies of the program - it IS measuring throughput. But once the stuff has come in over the pipe, the floating point hardware needed to compute the results is just as good or as fast.
It is the act of running N copies that makes it a throughput test, which admittedly is a bottleneck for intel. But you cannot say that intel's floating-point hardware which is used to do the actual computation is any slower.

Like I said, you clearly don't understand what you're talking about. "Thoughput" doesn't exclusively refer to memory bandwidth. "But once the stuff has come in over the pipe" - what pipe?

What throughput means in this case is simply the rate at which it can do floating point computations - I'm not sure how else you would want to measure performance. While specfp_rate might not be accurate for single-threaded fp calculations on a multi-core CPU, there's no point having a quad core CPU if you're only ever going to be using a single core.

I think you're being intentionally obtuse