On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 09:42, Greg Cockburn wrote: > I would definitely get a copy and give it ago, esp on the AMD64. > > On another note, I was thinking of getting an AMD64 system, what is your > experience with this so far? > > I have run linux on HPPA and Sun boxes, but not as a desktop, so I am very > interested in trying this out. > > Have fun, > Greg.
I've played with a dual Opteron (2GHz CPU's) with 4GB RAM that was on loan to our head-office in Boston earlier this year. What's to say - it screamed along! We pitted it against a dual Xeon 3.06GHz/4GB RAM box and the Opteron hosed it on every test: MySQL, Apache Tomcat and Samba in particular were real winners. It was a lot of fun :) In fact we've now changed our strategy when the time comes to upgrade our core "crunching" boxes (currently a cluster of 48 Xeon CPUS in 24 servers). Originally we were going to Sun Sparc architecture, but now it looks like we'll be using AMD Opteron instead. We are CPU<->RAM limited mostly, disk and network I/O isn't a major bottle-neck for us. In terms of ROI (aka "bangs per buck") the Opteron is a real winner for us. I can't stretch my personal budget to a dual Opteron setup but I did manage to squeeze a few extra dollars outta the porcelain pig to upgrade my Athlon 1GHz box to a Athlon64 2GHz setup with 1GB RAM. I'm keen to install SuSE on it too - seems the only distro with pre-compiled 64bit binaries :) --James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
