Re: hardware advice

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.