Re: dell versus hp

On Fri, 9 Nov 2007, Scott Marlowe wrote:

>> Not atm. Until new benchmarks are published comparing AMD's new
>> quad-core with Intel's ditto, Intel has the edge.
>> http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6
>
> For 8 cores, it appears AMD has the lead, read this (stolen from
> another thread):
> http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20Preview.pdf

This issue isn't simple, and it may be the case that both conclusions are 
correct in their domain but testing slightly different things.  The 
sysbench test used by the FreeBSD benchmark is a much simpler than what 
the tweakers.net benchmark simulates.

Current generation AMD and Intel processors are pretty close in 
performance, but guessing which will work better involves a complicated 
mix of both CPU and memory issues.  AMD's NUMA architecture does some 
things better, and Intel's memory access takes a second hit in designs 
that use FB-DIMMs.  But Intel has enough of an advantage on actual CPU 
performance and CPU caching that current designs are usually faster 
regardless.

For an interesting look at the low-level details here, the current 
mainstream parts are compared at http://techreport.com/articles.x/11443/13 
and a similar comparison for the just released quad-core Opterons is at 
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/12

Nowadays Intel vs. AMD is tight enough that I don't even worry about that 
part in the context of a database application (there was still a moderate 
gap when the Tweakers results were produced a year ago).  On a real 
server, I'd suggest being more worried about how good the disk controller 
is, what the expansion options are there, and relative $/core.  In the 
x86/x64 realm, I don't feel CPU architecture is a huge issue right now 
when you're running a database.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD