From: Chris Mauritz chrism@imntv.com

If you have a task that's I/O bound, then perhaps Bryan's concerns will impact your decision on a motherboard. For my purposes, I'm mostly cpu bound,

Then it doesn't apply.

it really doesn't mean a hell of a lot to me that one cpu is "stuck" with mundane I/O tasks. And as cpus get faster and faster, this becomes less of an issue (if it's really an issue at all for most tasks).

That's not it at all. It has nothing to do with CPU performance. It has everything to do with interconnect and the processor affinity with regards to I/O and memory mapped transfers.

Also, as Bryan mentions, the S2895 splits the I/O up a bit better and the newer revs of that board support dual core Opterons too.

Technically, all mainboards should support dual-core Opterons. But the market reality is why give consumers a BIOS update when you can charge for a new mainboard? ;->

Dual-core A64/Opterons don't change the interconnect one bit. Dual-core Xeons/P4s are a whole different story.

So if you're in an I/O heavy environment you could choose that board rather than the S2882.

Assume you could make use of one of the PCIe x16 slots for a storage or other communications device, as well as the 2nd NIC.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org