Re: hardware advice

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 3:28 PM, David Boreham <david_list(at)boreham(dot)org> wrote:
> On 9/27/2012 3:16 PM, Claudio Freire wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
> Actually we test memory bandwidth with John McCalpin's stream program.
> Unfortunately it is hard to find stream test results for recent machines so
> it can be hard to compare two boxes unless you own examples, so I didn't
> mention it as a useful option. But if you can find results for the machines,
> or ask a friend to run it for you...definitely useful information.

IIRC the most recent tests from Greg Smith show the latest model
Intels winning by a fair bit over the opterons. Before that though
the 48 core opteron servers were winning. It tends to go back and
forth. Dollar for dollar, the Opterons are usually the better value
now, while the Intels give the absolute best performance money can
buy.