[Gllug] Best option for a lot of compute power

Daniel P. Berrange dan at berrange.com
Mon Jun 7 09:49:28 UTC 2004


On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 05:39:15PM +0100, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> On Sunday, June 6, 2004, John Winters wrote:
> 
> > I am therefore considering putting in a bid for a powerful multi-cpu
> > workstation.  The obvious choice seems to be between a couple of
> > hyperthreaded processors (giving almost 4 effective processors) or a
> 
> Hyperthreading gives very little actual performance boost considering
> the price.
> 
> > couple of AMD 64 bit processors.
> 
> We sell a lot of opteron kit, you can get a dual opteron box for not
> all that much money which'll kick the pants off a dual p4 doing
> hyperhtreading.

One of the real killer features of the Opteron is its memory
bus architecture which lets the memory bandwidth scale up
linearly as CPUs are added. By constrast no matter how
many Xeon CPUs you've got they all share the same fixed 
memory bandwidth. So for applications which are memory
bandwidth limited, going from 2 Xeon to 4 Xeons adds nothing,
but going to 4 Opterons absolutely kicks ass.

Dan.
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