Processor technology choice

[Rocky McGaugh]

Opteron prices are on par with the Xeon's.

I see no reason for anyone, anywhere to ever buy Athlon MP's ever
again. The processor core is almost identical to the Opterons except 
that the Opterons have the 64-bit extensions. The opterons get a great
benefit from the Hypertransport bus. They have great memory bandwidth 
and interprocess latency.

Debain for amd64 is still under development. I occasionaly talk with
the guys who are doing the port, and I dont think it is quite ready
for prime-time yet. If you really know what you are doing, you can 
probably make it work, but it is not going to be trivial.

Debian would be great on Xeon/Athlon/Itainium2 though.

the Opteron's will give you a bit less potential raw FLOPS, but you will
most likely achieve a greater effiency from those processors (versus Xeon) 
due to the faster memory bus.

The best way is to test your code on each

-- 
Rocky McGaugh
Atipa Technologies
rocky at atipatechnologies.com
rmcgaugh at atipa.com
1-785-841-9513 x3110
http://67.8450073/
perl -e 'print unpack(u, ".=W=W+F%T:7\!A+F-O;0H`");'

On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, José M. Pérez Sánchez wrote:

> Hi people:
> 
> We are planning to install a small cluster (around 12 processors).
> We mainly are going to do pattern recognition, and will run
> applications using artificial neural-network and genetic algorithms.
> 
> We want to put around 6 dual processor machines running GNU/Linux with
> OpenMosix, and MPI on top of it. One server with SCSI storage and the 
> rest of the nodes will be diskless. 
> 
> The main design uncertainty we have is what processor technology to use.
> Our choices are Intel Xeon, AMD Athlon XP/MP and Opteron. We are
> particularly interested in Opteron even if we have to put a couple of
> nodes less. My questions are:
> 
> - Will we have some computing power gain using Opteron with the same
>   budget?
> - What about long term maintenance cost, for how long will be 32 bit
>   technology components generally available at normal price, now that we
>   have Opteron and Itanium?
> - Most vendors say it's better to buy Intel (I personally think AMD are
>   equivalent and cheaper), are they just trying to sell the most
>   expensive? Any known real trouble with cooling for AMDs, or just bad
>   case design?
> - We plan to use Debian, anyone with experience on it for 64 bit platforms.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Jose M. Pérez.
> Madrid. Spain.
> 
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