Monday Nov 28, 2005
AMD64, IntelP4 and Windows XP x64 and more
I spend most of yesterday installing Windows XP Professional 64bit on my desktop at home, as I just upgraded my home PC to the following spec:
Mind you I spent around $700, and if I added the hardrives, and sound cards that i already had I would have spent around $1300 for my desktop PC. I did the math, and if I had actually bought a Sun Ultra 20 AMD Opteron based workstation, I would have saved myself money and got alot better performance as I would have the Opteron CPU instead of the Athlon64, and also the case, motherboard and components are just so much better quality. Oh well, I might wait for the Dual Core AMD 64 workstations to come out soon.
So after spending 2 hours upgrading all the components, and a few cuts from the system case later, Windows XP Pro 64bit edition install OK, but then went to install drivers and found out that half of my components and peripherals that I only just bought 1-2 years ago don't have 64bit drivers.... Epson and Leadtek both told me, when I emailed them, for the products I had, that there are no plans for 64bit drivers for them. Then I also realised that the Cisco VPN client doesnt work either, and neither does my Trend Micro Antivirus Software, as they both have 32bit drivers, so I then decided not to progress any further.
So I pulled out my SuSe CD's and installed SLES9, and within a few hours, and assistance from Google and the thousands of FAQ's and forums on the web, I got all my peripherals working.
This is an interesting shift, as who would have thought that Linux would be where it is today. It is a very viable desktop alternative, and also a good platform for webservices type applications. Mind you I wouldn't recommend it for more than that. Things like Databases, CRM etc.. should live on Solaris 10 (x86, x64 or SPARC) as it is free and just a better OS platform, especially when installed on one of our Sun Fire AMD Opteron servers.
So I am happy to say I have a desktop now that I can use, and it absolutely flys.... I was very impressed to see that the AMD64 CPU's run at around 26 degreesC idle and the graphics card actually runs almost twice as hot idle (48 degreesC). My old Pentium 4 2.0GHz system, the CPU idled at 38 degreesC and when you actually put some load on it, it would go into the high 50 degreesC, and on average the chasis temperature was around 39 degreesC with 2 case fans, and big heatsink/fan on the CPU (funnily enough Intel recommend the chasis temp to be under 38 degreesC). The chasis temp is now 28 degreesC with my AMD setup so at least now it doesnt heat up my room.
There was also an interesting article reviewing the new P4's and AMD64 CPU's, and it's easy to see why the Intel CPU's run hotter. Intel have improved their heat/power consumption when the cpu is idle (still considerably higher than AMD), but when you actually use the CPU the power consumption is 50 Watts more.
The article is located here.
It was funny as I went to a customer site who we are starting a pilot at, we walked into their server room, and all their racks were half full so we thought we could put our pilot servers in those racks. We got an email the next day saying that they can't add anymore servers to the server room as the air conditioning and power needed to be upgraded as it has reached maximum capacity. They had just bought 12 2-Way Pentium 4 servers from Hell and now have to upgrade their server room to accomodate them. It's not hard to see why, for example an AMD Opteron Dual core CPU consumes 95 Watts of Power, where a Pentium 4 Dual Core CPU consumes 240Watts. Multiply that by 100's and there is the reason why server rooms are running out of cooling/power. I'm happy to say the customer is now looking at tossing 2 week old systems to replace them with AMD Opteron based Sun Fire X4x00 Servers as it's cheaper (about a quarter of the cost) to buy new servers than upgrade the server room.
I must go now as the girlfriend is calling, but the funniest thing of the week, is that Dell announced that they were going to start producing AMD based systems going forward. So I guess Hell has frozen over (or at least will be!!!) Hehehehe... :-)
Posted at 05:02PM Nov 28, 2005 by sunraybruce in General | Comments[1]
Posted by William Hathaway on November 29, 2005 at 02:33 AM EST #