Re: Opinions AMD64 vs EM64T vs Itanium II

Paul Krizak wrote:
> While I'm obviously a bit biased, I would definitely suggest going with
> an Opteron-based solution.  AMD64 is the original x86-64 implementation
> (EM64T is a clone of our architecture), and thus the linux community has
> had more time to tweak the drivers, compilers, etc. to work with AMD64 cpus.
> 
> Also, going with AMD chips provides a long and stable upgrade path.  You
> can start with dual-core DDR2/667 chips in your blades, and then when
> quad-core comes out, you'll be able to upgrade to quad-core DDR2/800+
> chips and stay within the same power envelope.
> 
> AMD chips scale much better past four cores than Intel's chips, due to
> Intel sticking with the antiquated front side bus architecture, whereas
> AMD has high-speed HyperTransport links between each chip.  When you get
> those big beefy 4-socket 16-core blades, rest assured that the AMD
> variety will perform much better than an equivalent Xeon configuration,
> even if the 2-socket/4-core performance right now favors the Intel chips.
> 
> Paul Krizak                         5900 E. Ben White Blvd. MS 625
> Advanced Micro Devices              Austin, TX  78741
> Linux/Unix Systems Engineering      Phone: (512) 602-8775
> Silicon Design Division

I'll try not to be biased.  I'll agree with Paul that AMD's architecture 
has been superior for the last 2+ years, as proven in our production IT 
environment as well as Engineering developers working on IOS and other 
Cisco products.

We have shown, for example, the HP DL580 G3 is up to 40% slower and 37% 
more expensive than the HP DL585.  This includes real-life and 
artificial benchmarks.

We are about to evaluate the 2 socket Xeon 5160-based systems for 
various reasons, but I tend to believe Paul's last paragraph.  When the 
MP version of the Xeon / Woodcrest is released, I imagine it will suffer 
from performance issues in comparison to AMD.

Some of our engineering folks use software that costs hundreds of 
thousands of dollars per head per year to lease and they always want the 
latest and greatest 2 socket system.  Considering the numbers on 
http://www.spec.org from Xeon 5160 vs. Opteron 254, we have to evaluate 
the Xeons.  :)

/Brian/