[CentOS] Dual Opteron or Dual Xeon?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 at 4:24pm, Feizhou wrote

>> Do you have any more details on said stability problems (e.g. hardware 
>> specs, etc)?  I've been very impressed with the Woodcrest Xeon tester I've 
>> got -- in fact, it bests my Opterons in almost every benchmark I throw at 
>> it, and it's been rock solid.  I'm leaning pretty hard in that direction 
>> for my next cluster upgrade.
>> 
> The information about the US Government throwing the Woodcrest solution out 
> was 'reported' by the Inquirer. :D Perhaps IBM boxes...they also posted 
> another interesting bit about Woodcrest and Intel 965 motherboards having 
> problems with raid5...kind of like how there is bad mixing if you use ext3 + 
> 3ware in RAID5 mode maybe. I am afraid that is all I can give you on this.

Ah, yes, the Inquirer.  Is there enough salt in the world?

> The Korean portal one can be found below but it is entirely in korean.
>
> http://www.inews24.com/php/news_view.php?g_menu=020200&g_serial=225735
>
> Something about overheating and FB-DIMM problems which was only encountered 
> after the thing went live.

Hrm.  Sounds like an implementation problem.

> How close to live are your benchmarks?

This is what I've got so far <http://www.duke.edu/~jlb17/optxeon.pdf>. 
Yes, the Xeons have a slight clockspeed advantage, but not near enough to 
account for the performance increase.  The thermal simulation results 
surprised me -- I really expected the Opterons to fare better there, given 
how memory intensive they are.  Only the heart phantom sim showed better 
performance on Opteron due to the onboard memory controller.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University