At $851 per chip, the Opteron 254 is significantly cheaper than the Opteron 275-and in some cases, a better value. That question turns entirely on the issue of workloads and software parallelization, but based on what we've seen, we can draw some general conclusions.

When it comes to 3D rendering performance, however, the Opteron 275 is the 800-pound gorilla; no other CPU or configuration that we've tested from AMD or Intel comes even close to competing with the Opteron 275's results. The differences are more than academic. Consider, for a moment, the Opteron 275's render time in Lightwave 83's Radiosity_Box test (784 seconds) versus the Opteron 254 (1097 seconds) and the dual Xeon 3.6 (1017 seconds). That's the time required to compute a single frame of animation, and animations typically run at 24 frames per second. An animation scene that rendered at the same speed as Radiosity_Box would require 5.2 hours of render time on the Opteron 275, 6.8 hours on the dual Xeon 3.6GHz, and 7.3 hours on the Opteron 254. That's a huge gap, and it makes a dual-socket, dual-core Opteron 275 rig an easy choice for any render station.