Keith Bierman's Weblog

Wednesday December 14, 2005

Xeon is just as Good as Opteron (says HP!) Thanks to the folks at theInq for calling our attention to this one. Aside from the Inq's warning that you need an HP signon, also be prepared for a Microsoft Word source document. It's actually a rather nice writeup, and it's conclusion seems to be "true". If your workload is bottlenecked on I/O having a faster processor with a faster memory interface won't help.

Of course, that really is pretty obvious and doesn't take 21 pages to justify now does it?

In a variety of places, their detailed analysis favors the AMD processor, for example from page 14

1.The more content that can be cached in memory the greater the Opteron advantage. This performance difference is tied to the different designs of the two processors... detailing the FSB vs. HT issues

"Countered with"

2.If any of the server sub-components become a bottleneck, the Opteron memory access speed advantage is negated.

So the obvious solution is to favor systems with fast processors, fast and ample memory bandwidth and fast I/O subsystems.

Unfortunately that doesn't result in "all processors being equal" at least not if you buy the right subsystems ;>

(2005-12-14 13:18:40.0) Permalink

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