No, no AMD64 experience, but last year, I was on a 6 mo. contract to HP in Roseville, CA working as a "firmware engineer" on their new Itanium-II server line.
The CPU's that are now shipping are a good bit better than those which were used during product development in 2002. I installed both RHEL and Debian almost daily, on these boxes. I used one of the dual-CPU 8-meg'r prototypes as my RH install server. These puppys can sing. Both the RH and the Debian distros regularly and reliably installed without a hitch. HP was sending prototypes to Industrial Light & Magic at the time for early user feedback. The boxes, from top to bottom, have really been wrung out. All of the environmental, temp, humidity, bla bla bla testing is all first rate, and Linux handles all of the Fan, Temp, intrusion swithches and etc. Case, connectors, all of the mechanical design is top-notch. HP has had a flock of their own Linux on-staff experts involved in the kernel development out in Fort Collins, Colorado. Go to this page: http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/entry_level/index.html To see the three members of the family. The RX-2600 can be had for about XXxx$2500xxXX (DAMN! They raised the price to $3,882 !!!) http://www.hp.com/workstations/itanium/index.html and will max out at 24GB of real RAM, which, yes, Linux can address quite well, thankyou. Moving 64 bits of data at 1.4GHZ is like moving 32 bits of data at 2.8GHZ. The reason the AMDs are popular is that they run the old x-86 instruction set on 64bit silicon. So any "Legacy" application is guaranteed to run. Even DOS, WordStar and SpaceInvaders ;-) Intel's Itaniums are not "backward compatible" and only run the new pure 64 bit instruction set. AMDs CPUs do not handle the new instruction set. They only run the old 8/16/32 extended/bastardized instruction set. Of course, the best Itanium-II compiler is still "gcc". Even though the Itanium gcc complier has not been modified, optimized and enhanced to the extent of the old X86 compilers, the CPUs themselves are still powerhouses, and things will only improve as the gnu compiler gurus continue to optimize. The X86 is, by now, totally tweaked out. There's no more water to squeeze out of that silcon rock. Based on the fact that you are a member of this group, you may want to reconsider your choice. Since any source (APT, or RPM .src) will compile fine on the 64 bit hardware, and you are not stuck with only running MS binaries, I believe that in the long run you would do best with the low-end RX 2600 (his name is Wilson, in case you care. Wilson kicks it real good.) So to summarize, I don't have benchmark data, but I know good stuff when I work with it. These machines are well designed, tested, are highly reliable and offer high performance. If you can afford the few extra bucks, you'll be very happy indeed. My 2 bits, Marty -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Hugh Crissman Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 8:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [TriLUG] AMD64 vs. P4 & Linux Recently I have been doing some hardware shopping. I have been looking at the AMD 64 bit processor and P4 processors. Does anyone have any experience running linux on the AMD64? What is the performance like? How do you think it compares to the P4? All the benchmarks I have found are windows OS comparisons. Thanks for any input anyone might have. Hugh Crissman -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
