Hello,
We're planning new production server for PostgreSQL and I'm wondering
which processor (or even platform) will be better: Quad Xeon or Quad
Opteron (for example SUN now has a new offer Sun Fire X4440 x64).
When I was buying my last database server, then SUN v40z was a really
very good choice (Intel's base server was slower). This v40z still works
pretty good but I need one more.
AFAIK Intel made some changes in chipset but... is this better then AMD
HyperTransport and Direct Connect Architecture from database point of
view? How about L3 cache - is this important for performance?
Intel's chipset is still broken when using dual sockets and quad core processors. The problem manifests itself as excessive cache line bouncing. In my opinion the best bang/buck combo on the CPU side is the fastest dual-core Xeon CPUs you can find. You get excellent single-thread performance and you still have four processors, which was a fantasy for most people only 5 years ago. In addition you can put a ton of memory in the new Xeon machines. 64GB is completely practical.
I still run several servers on Opterons but in my opinion they don't make sense right now unless you truly need the CPU parallelism.
-jwb
