I dont want this to turn into an arguments about AMD vs Intel So as most of you know, I have had an Intel P67 chipset and 2600k processor overclocked to 4.5GHz for quite a while now. It is an incredibly fast system. I have now sold that system to Blackice and bought an AMD 990FX chipset motherboard and a cheap Phenom II X4 955 to hold me over till Zambezi is out. And this is where my thread question comes about. I have hosted Minecraft servers for months, I have seen plenty of times what kind of load Minecraft takes with different amount of people on the server. I have seen the changes from different versions of MC. Formerly, the XoO server used to take around 13-17% of CPU resources and between 600-900MB of RAM. But the very odd thing is, on my new computer that is slower and has less processing threads, the exact same server with the exact same config now takes 0-6% CPU resources and 500-800MB of RAM. Yet I have a less powerful processor... SO I am posting this thread to see if anyone who has extensive tech knowledge can provide some sort of explanation or even ideas to look into as to why there is such a large performance difference when the only thing that changed is the chipset and processor, going to a lower end computer. I actually expected the exact opposite to happen here and I am at a loss to understand why this is.
I have some speculation on this. It could be a combination of factors, possibly the L2 Cache or a form of system resource conservation. Server dynamics, although I'm not familiar with Minecraft specifically, are usually a mathematical-specific process and the Phenom II X4 955 ranked pretty comfortably with that. The load on a Minecraft server isn't all that much, so it might just be that the 4 x 512KB type of L2 Cache divides and manages that particular task more efficiently? On a low output level, the Phenom might simply be tuned better for the task. The 2600k build is manufactured with the specific task of maxing out. It sure sounds like something Intel would do vs. the quality AMD has consistently innovated. Interesting find Enigma.
