Well, you overlook one thing there. SUN has always has a really good I/O performance - something far from negligible for a database application. A lot of the PC systems lack that kind of I/O thruput. Just compare a simple P4 with ATAPI drives to the same P4 with 320 SCSI drives - the speed difference, particularly using any *nix, is surprisingly significant and easily visible with the bare eye. There is a reason why a lot of the financial/insurance institutions (having a lot of transactions in their DB applications) use either IBM mainframes or SUN E10k's :-) Personally I think a weaker processor with top of the line I/O will perform better for DB apps than the fastest processor with crappy I/O. i guess the "my $0.02" is in order here :-) UC On Saturday 23 April 2005 01:06, William Yu wrote: > Looked on AMD's website. 132 for 4x875 on Windows, 126 on Linux. > (Probably Intel compiler on Windows, gcc on Linux.) That gets AMD into > the $100K 16+ processor Sun system area in terms of performance. Of > course, Sun still has a crapload of other uptime/reliability features > built-in to their systems. > > William Yu wrote: > > The numbers don't have the latest dual core Opterons yet. (Don't see > > them on spec.org yet either.) My random guess right now, 4x2 system > > would probably be about 140 SpecINT_rate. It's looking like it's faster > > than have a DC Opteron w/ 1 memory bank versus Dual Opteron w/ 2 memory > > bank because the interconnect between cores inside a DC CPU is so much > > faster than the HT motherboard connect. > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command > (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) -- Open Source Solutions 4U, LLC 2570 Fleetwood Drive Phone: +1 650 872 2425 San Bruno, CA 94066 Cell: +1 650 302 2405 United States Fax: +1 650 872 2417 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)