Re: Building new intel nocona machine with debian....
On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 11:36:28AM -0500, Bill wrote:
> This is actually not really the right newsgroup for this post (I have
> already tried hardware newsgroups, but none seem centered on the x86-64)
> .That being said I am certain someone here has had experience with something
> at least close to this situation. I would very much like to build a
> Supermicro X6DHE-XG2 motherboard computer with dual Xeon processors.these
> are apparently clones of the AMD Opteron (except for missing certain
> proprietary chip instruction sets).I plan to run Debian AMD64 on these
> systems eventually, however the real question I have is unfortunately, far
> more primitive, which is simply can I build these machines with standard
> cases (what is Extended ATX????) , I am thinking of the Thermaltake Xaser
> III, will this support the heatsink?
Calling the intel Xeon's with EMT64 clones of the opteron is way over
simplifying things.
As far as I can tell, intel has taken the existing P4 based Xeon, and
added in the 64bit instructions that AMD added to x86 when they made the
opteron/athlon 64 chips. They hence allow the use of more than 4G ram
(without using the PAE memory mapping extensions (which I think are OS
memory extensions, not application memory space extensions). I very
much doubt they went and redesigned the core to be a 64bit chip
throughout. The athlon 64s get faster when running in 64bit mode, since
that is their native mode by design, and where they work best. The Xeon
was designed as a 32bit chip, and I very much doubt that the 64bit
extensions will do anything other than allow you to use more than 4G ram
per application, and may even cause it to run slightly slower in some
cases.
So unless you have a database that needs over 4G ram to itself, I doubt
runing 64bit on the Xeon is a useful idea.
Ofcourse I could be wrong, and intel did completely redesign the chips
internals when they suddenly realized AMD was on to something, and
popped out a real 64bit processor with the same instructions as AMD has.
I just doubt it.
Lennart Sorensen
Reply to: