On 01/04/2011 14:16, Richard Elling wrote:
<snip>
You won't run out of CPU, but you can run out of I/O. For most 2-socket Intel
boxes, there is
only one IOH. The 5520 IOH only provides 36 PCI-e lanes, so you will see
different combinations
of PCI-e bridges on systems from various vendors. Obviously, fewer bridges is
better and that tends
to become the biggest architectural difference in the machines. Similar
analysis applies to the AMD
chipsets. For an interesting case of simplicity built for speed, look at the
Sun X4500 design.
*nods*
There are also the memory speed differences, the latest AMD Opteron 6xxx
series seems able to go all the way up to 256GB Ram at 1333MHz, whereas
the Dell Intel Nehalem boxes appear to drop down to 800MHz for the RAM
speed beyond 96GB. I'm not sure how this would impact the maximum
throughput of the box though.
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