On Monday 12 September 2005 15:40, Denis wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I am currently running Gentoo on a dual-processor machine that has 2
> Intel Xeons with hyperthreading on a Tyan board, with 2GB of RDRAM.
> Some 3 years ago when I bought this machine, it was a marvel, and it
> still is a solid computational workhorse for me, doing things like
> Monte Carlo and Finite Element calculations. Because of
> hyperthreading, there are 4 logical processors, which gives me a good
> multi-tasking ability. I can run 3 or 4 Monte Carlo tasks at the same
> time and not get any noticeable slow-down compared to running only one
> Monte Carlo task. That has been indispensable in my productivity.
>
> Now, I am about to purchase a new machine, but I'd like to solicit
> some advice first, so I can get the most bang for the buck. The main
> thing is, I still need to have those 4 logical processors to maintain
> my productivity. So that gives me two choices:
>
> - 2 64-bit Irwindale Xeons (EM64T) with Hyperthreading, 2MB L2 Cache,
> 800 MHZ FSB, somewhere in 3.4-3.8 GHz range
>
> - 2 64-bit AMD Dual-Core Opterons somewhere in the 265-275 range
>
> With my need for parallel execution of several single-thread Monte
> Carlo and Finite Element tasks, what would be the pros and cons in
> considering the Xeons and Opterons?
>
> I looked at several benchmarks, and the Opterons seem to be leading
> the way significantly in pretty much every category except things like
> Matrix multiplications (because of vectoring?)... Is that the general
> impression of folks with experience on these systems running Linux?
>
> What would be some issues and software limitations for me in trying to
> get the AMD Opterons running on Gentoo? And would I use an x86
> platform or an AMD64 platform?
>
> Thanks!
> Denis
I don't know the benchmarks, but I DO know that I got a 64-bit gentoo system
running on a dual-core athlon 4400. It's a single-dual-core cpu, using a
Tyan Tomkat k8e board (only one cpu slot on the board). There were no
problems or gotchas I could tell. It's got 4 gigs of ram and screams (at
least on kernel compiles and such....haven't benchmarked mysql on it yet).
--
John Jolet
Your On-Demand IT Department
512-762-0729
www.jolet.net
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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