Re: Opinion question (Core2 Duo)
On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 10:41 -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 03:08:48PM +0100, Jo Shields wrote:
> > Or more? Buy an Altix! ;)
>
> Ehm, well the Altix uses either the itanium (why would anyone want that
> crap) or a dual socket core 2 based cpu. That hardly matches a 4 or
> more cpu opteron server.
Let's assume I have large examples of both IA64 and AMD64. Plus further
benchmark data we collected ourselves.
IA64 is fast, for floating point code. On paper, it offers the same
per-core-per-Hz FLOP count as Core (twice that of AMD64). And in
practise, Altix scales, whilst the competition, well, doesn't. In our
benchmarks, IA64 was not only faster per-GHz than POWER5 or AMD64, but
faster in absolute terms too, with an 8-way test absolutely dominated by
a 1.6-GHz-Montecito-based Altix, whilst AMD64 didn't even register a
pulse.
However, for IA64, compiler choice is key - using GCC to compile test
code isn't just crippling the system, it's throwing away hundreds of
thousands (if not more) of investment
> SGI has nothing of any real interest. No wonder they went under not
> that long ago. :)
They've got SMP machines that don't choke at >4 cores. For some
applications, that's of great interest.
--
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/ Jo Shields <jms@osc.ox.ac.uk> \
| Systems Manager, |
\ Oxford Supercomputing Centre /
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