Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Rob Logan wrote:
Intel's RAM is faster because it needs to be.
I'm confused how AMD's dual channel, two way interleaved
128-bit DDR2-667 into an on-cpu controller is faster than
Intel's Lynnfield dual channel, Rank and Channel interleaved
DDR3-1333 into an on-cpu controller.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3634
I see that you are reading a game computing web site. It is for
people who want to build PCs to run video games under Windows. The
most useful thing I see in the referenced article is that these new
Intel Core i7 CPUs are able to idle at much lower power levels, which
seems quite useful for a home NAS server. Otherwise I don't see much
which indicates what the performance would be with Solaris/zfs in a
storage-setup.
The main focus should be on how much ECC RAM you can stuff into the
motherboard and how much it costs. After that comes multi-threaded
memory I/O performance and power consumption. Raw CPU computational
performance should be way down in the priority level. Even a fairly
slow CPU should be able to saturate gigabit ethernet.
Bob
I would second Bob's recommendations. For a storage box, the primary
things of important are having enough ECC RAM to cache everything. A big
L2ARC SSD seems to be equally important for those using dedup regularly.
Also, be /very/ careful with buying non-Xeon Intel CPUs. With anything
prior to the Nehalem architecture, the memory controller was on the
motherboard, and you specifically have to get a motherboard which
supports ECC Ram. For the Nehalem and later architectures (Core i3, i5,
i7), with the memory controller on the CPU, only SOME of them support
ECC RAM. I /strongly/ suggest looking at the CPU specs from Intel
first, when getting any non-Xeon CPU or motherboard:
http://ark.intel.com/Default.aspx
AMD, of course, does not have this problem. ALL x64 AMD CPUs sold these
days support ECC. And, it seems that finding an AMD motherboard which has
Frankly, I suspect that a small storage box pumping data out a single
1Gbit ethernet interfaces really doesn't stress a CPU that much, in the
big scheme of things. I like the original Phenom X3 or X4 as a good
compromise between modest L2 cache, modest power draw, good multi-core,
and really cheap price.
If you really want something hard-core, I'd step over into the older AMD
Barcelona-based Opterons. They're equivalent to the Phenom, plus their
motherboards come with just stupid numbers of DIMM slots.
:-)
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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