David Boreham wrote:
It isn't only Postgres. I work on a number of other server applications that also run much faster on Opterons than the published benchmark figures would suggest they should. They're all compiled with gcc4, so possibly there's a compiler issue. I don't run Windows on any of our Opteron boxes so I can't easily compare using the MS compiler.
Maybe it's just a fact that the majority of x86 64-bit development for open source software happens on Opteron/A64 machines. 64-bit AMD machines were selling a good year before 64-bit Intel machines were available. And even after Intel EMT64 were available, anybody in their right mind would have picked AMD machines over Intel due to cost/heat/performance. So you end up with 64-bit OSS being developed/optimized for Opterons and the 10% running Intel EMT64 handle compatibility issues.
Would be interesting to see a survey of what machines OSS developers use to write/test/optimize their code.
