It's time for me to update my Xen machines, and I'm out looking for new hardware. When I first bought my Xen hosts, AMD was kicking tail and taking names; the on-board memory controller and hypertransport in particular was a big bonus in the regard. Then I shifted my attention to more pressing system matters, and stopped following the CPU wars.
But now as I compare my options of a Sandy-Bridge Xeon vs a Bulldozer Opteron, it looks like AMD has had it's butt handed to it on a platter, at least on benchmarker's windows-based desktops. I haven't been able to find anything on the server side though to see if the new dual integer modules would hold up in server virtualization, as AMD says was the design goals. I suspect that AMD's reduction from 3 to 2 ALU's per thread is going to kill server performance just as it did with the desktop, though it pains me to say so. Does anyone have any experience with the new Opterons that can confirm if they are DOA performance-wise? Or does recompiling with special gcc flags to optimize the multiply ordering restore AMD's standing for threaded server performance? Grazie, ;-Daniel Fussell /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
