Opinions AMD64 vs EM64T vs Itanium II

Ken,

	thanks for the information. We also like to keep hardware
architectures to a minimal amount, and that ability scale is
important
to us. I'll check out the article you've linked as well.

Thanks,

Kevin 

-----Original Message-----
From: nahant-list-bouncesredhat.com
[mailto:nahant-list-bouncesredhat.com] On Behalf Of
Ken Snider
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 3:56 PM
To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (Nahant) Discussion List
Cc: Discussion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (Taroon)
Subject: Re: Opinions AMD64 vs EM64T vs Itanium II

Collins, Kevin [MindWorks] wrote:
> Just wanted to say thanks for the many opinions that I
have so far 
> received. In our initial use, these servers will be for
serving LDAP, 
> VNC, HTTP, etc. Nothing where huge performance is
required.

The prevailing wisdom, at least for our applications, is
that the
Opteron platform, on AM2, is *far* better suited to
Multi-processor (as
you start getting into honking big systems, as in 4-way+).
The EM64T
platform will not scale in the same way. Because of this, we
decided to
standardize on Opteron, because we didn't want
micro-architecture
oddities between 2-way EM64T and 4-way+ AMD64 systems to
become an
issue.

There's a *great* Article about this at ArsTechnica here:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060411-6581.html

Snippet here:

"AMD won't be introducing a major new CPU
architecture to replace Hammer
until 2007. In the meantime, the company plans to combat
Intel's Conroe
by exploiting the edge that their combination of a more
scalable,
glueless multiprocessor interconnect-coherent
HyperTransport-with an
on-die memory controller gives them over Intel's aging FSB
architecture
and off-die memory controller.

For the consumer, these kinds of issues aren't going to
have a direct
impact on performance or purchasing decisions. Consumers
don't care that
you can gluelessly add new sockets, and that AMD's NUMA
design means
that the system's aggregate bandwidth can scale right
through the roof.
This is because even high-end consumer-level systems are
going to have
one socket, period, and in the single-socket world of
content creation
and gaming benchmark bakeoffs Conroe's shared-bus FSB and
off-die memory
controller won't hold it back. Not even when the number of
cores per
chip increases will the AM2 + HT + on-die DDR2 combination
give AMD a
single-socket advantage over Intel, since there's only a
certain amount
of bandwidth you can push through one lone socket, HT or no
HT.

The main place where the influence of HT + AM2 + on-die DDR2
will be
felt is in the server market. Multisocket AMD boards will be
cheaper to
make, and they'll have more aggregate memory bandwidth.
Furthermore, in
the realm of four sockets and up, AMD's interconnect and
memory
bandwidth edge will probably be decisive."

Basically, we decided to go with an architecture that will
scale as we
do.

--Ken. 

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