Re: newbie questions for amd64
On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Stephen Hassard wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 09:16:25AM -0700, Harcort Fenton Mudd wrote:
> > 2. What is the difference between the athlon-64 and opteron cpu's
> > 2a. Any opinions about which is the better cpu for scientific
> > (electronic structure) applications?
>
> Well, I've had a change to play with a bunch of opterons, and an athlon 64.
>
> The Athlon 64 3200+ is a 2.0GHz Opteron with only a single memory
> channel, running non-registered memory at DDR3200. It's only capable of
> 1-way operation.
>
> An Opteron 146 is a 2.0GHz Opteron with dual channel memory, requiring
> registered PC2700 memory (ECC is optional). The Opteron is capable of
> 2-way SMP/NUMA operation if you shell out for a 24x series processor.
>
> I've played with an Athlon 64 in a Asus K8V motherboard (VIA K8T800
> chipset), and an Opteron 246 on an Asus SK8N motherboard (NVidia nForce3
> chipset). Both are really fast, although I have a feeling that the
> latencies on the Kingston PC3200 Reg/ECC memory are holding back the 246
> processor. From a general performance perspective, they seemed very
> similar in speed.
For a scientific application performance perspective the memory bandwidth
is often the limiting factor, so up to twice the performance on the
Opteron on those bandwidth bound applications.
/Mattias Wadenstein
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