Mike Mascari <mascarm@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 04/25/2005 09:21:02 PM: > Richard_D_Levine@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > In my *utter* lack of enthusiasm over this option, I was gathering > > ammunition for better hardware. I went to spec.org for speed comparisons, > > and sun.com for price comparisons. Sun's *entry* level servers are more > > powerful when running AMD CPUs. > > Just in case people still hold a bias against CISC processors capable of > running x86 code as necessarily inferior to more expensive 64-bit RISC > processors, in spite of the overwhelmingly obvious specint results to > the contrary, I'd like to offer up this little baby: > > http://www.cray.com/products/xt3/index.html > > Something everyone should have in their office... I RTFA. Oh my god. Favorite excerpts: AMD Opteron Processor The industry leading Opteron microprocessor offers a number of advantages for superior performance and scalability. The Opteron processor's on-chip, highly associative 1 MB cache supports aggressive out-of-order execution and can issue up to nine instructions simultaneously. The integrated memory controller eliminates the need for a separate Northbridge memory controller chip, providing an extremely low latency path to local memoryâless than 60 nanoseconds. This is a significant performance advantage, particularly for algorithms that require irregular memory access. The 128-bit wide memory controller provides 6.4 GB/s local memory bandwidth per processor, Â or more than one byte per FLOP. This balance brings a performance advantage to algorithms that stress local memory bandwidth. Service PEs run a full Linuxâ distribution. Service PEs can be configured to provide login, I/O, system, or network services. Scalable Operating System The Cray XT3 operating system UNICOS/lc is designed to run large complex applications and scale efficiently to 30,000 processors. The I/O architecture consists of data RAIDs connected directly to I/O PEs which reside on the high-speed interconnect. The Lustre file system manages the striping of file operations across these RAIDs. > > Mike Mascari---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
