Re: Help specifying new machine

On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 11:18, Raoul Buzziol wrote:
> > You're not going to be able to get a Dual Athlon MP for the same price
> > as a single Xeon. A few years back, this was the case because Xeon CPUs
> > & MBs had a huge premium over Athlon. This is no longer true mainly
> > because the number of people carrying Athlon MP motherboards has dropped
> > down drastically. Go to pricewatch.com and do a search for 760MPX -- you
> > get a mere 8 entries. Not surprisingly because who would not want to
> > spend a few pennies more for a much superior Dual Opteron? The few
> > sellers you see now just keep stuff in inventory for people who need
> > replacement parts for emergencies and are willing to pay up the nose
> > because it is an emergency.
>
> I saw pricewatch.com and you're right.
>
> I looked for some benchmarks, and I would know if I'm right on:
> - Dual Opteron 246 have aproximately the same performance of a Dual Xeon 3Gh
> (Opteron a little better)
> - Opteron system equal or cheeper than Xeon system.

For PostgreSQL, Opteron might be a touch worse than Xeon for single
processor, little better for Dual, and a whole heck of a bunch better
for Quads -- but this depends on your specific work load as memory
bound, cpu bound, lots of float math, etc. work loads will perform
differently.

In general, an Opteron is a better bet simply because you can shove more
ram onto it (without workarounds), and you can't beat an extra 8GB ram
on an IO bound database (consider your datasize in 1 year).