On Feb 12, 2005, at 9:54 AM, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
Howdy -
On Wednesday and Thursday I put together a new dual Opteron-250 system and installed SuSE 9.2 (64bit). Uneventful install but there were a few issues with rebuilding a few apps (all but one have been resolved - can't get Ogle to build so I'll use Xine instead).
Today I've been putting the Opteron system thru its paces and I have
to say the Opteron/AMD64 has impressed the hell out of me.
The Opteron-250 with its 2.4GHz clock is about *2X* faster than the
2GHz G5/PPC system I have! What took 34 hours to run on the G5 (or the
is that G5 PPC dual processor or not ?
Athlon-MP/2800 that the Opteron replaced - the Athlon-MP and G5 were quite similar in speed) is only going to take about 16 hours on the Opteron-250.
Interesting. What was the off-the-shelf price for the Opteron? The Opteron prices I've seen have been higher than the Apple G5 prices, but maybe not 2x more.
an opteron 250 processor goes for about 800 €, and an appropriate motherboard is about 500 €
if you factor in some ram, and a power supply, this comes out at a cool 3000 € (not including case or disks) which is pretty inexpensive
A more fair match to Opteron is probably the Power5, which has previously been priced way out of reach of normal people. It's changing though; there's now an entry-level system for $4799.
A $/fps comparison between different systems would be nice. y4mdenoise is IMO a good benchmark.
y4mdenoise is getting about 2.7 frames/sec on the Opteron and about
1.3 frames/sec on the G5. How much of that difference can be attributed
to the 64bit operation on the Opteron I do not know (OS/X is still
32bit userland until 10.4 comes out in a couple months).
the 64 bit operation may not have anything to do with it. especially if the algorithm is not designed for it.
64bit is generally slower than 32bit. The only benefit of 64bit is non-segmented addressing of several gigabytes of data. If you don't need that then 64 bit adressing is just overhead.
no it's not.
64 bit on a 32 bit processor is smaller because the processor only does 32 bits at a time.
It's an urban myth that 64bit is faster than 32bit, like people assume a 2GHz computer is twice as fast as a 1GHz computer.
the one thing that needs to be taken into account is the memory access architecture.
the amd architecture has the memory controller onboard, that manages a part of the system's memory. when it needs to access data some other processor in the system is handling, NUMA transfers occur through the hypertransport bus between those 2 processors.
in the intel architecture, processors have to fight access to the north bridge to get to the memory.
(and I am clueless about the G5 memory access architecture)
That is also why Apple have been reluctant to make a 64 bit Mac OS X, since the people who actually need it already buy AIX instead. Ditto for Windows.
Pity the Opteron-252 (2.6GHz clock) wasn't quite on the shelves yet
when I placed the order :)
is y4mdenoise using multithreaded design ?
if yes, you may want to hack it so that it locks each thread to a particular processor, taking into account the data transfers between each threads.
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