Re: hardware advice

On Sep 28, 2012, at 1:36 AM, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Claudio Freire <klaussfreire(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 6:08 PM, David Boreham <david_list(at)boreham(dot)org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> We went from Dunnington to Nehalem, and it was stunning how much better
>>>> the X5675 was compared to the E7450. Sandy Bridge isn't quite that much of a
>>>> jump though, so if you don't need that kind of bleeding-edge, you might be
>>>> able to save some cash. This is especially true since the E5-2600 series has
>>>> the same TDP profile and both use 32nm lithography.
>>>
>>> We use Opteron on a price/performance basis. Intel always seems to come up
>>> with some way to make their low-cost processors useless (such as limiting
>>> the amount of memory they can address).
>>
>> Careful with AMD, since many (I'm not sure about the latest ones)
>> cannot saturate the memory bus when running single-threaded. So, great
>> if you have a high concurrent workload, quite bad if you don't.
>
> Conversely, we often got MUCH better parallel performance from our
> quad 12 core opteron servers than I could get on a dual 8 core xeon at
> the time. The newest quad 10 core Intels are about as fast as the
> quad 12 core opteron from 3 years ago. So for parallel operation, do
> remember to look at the opteron. It was much cheaper to get highly
> parallel operation on the opterons than the xeons at the time we got
> the quad 12 core machine at my last job.
>

But what about latency, not throughput?