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List:       linux-smp
Subject:    Re: SMP motherboard/cpu recommendations, please...
From:       Daniel Freedman <freedman () ccmr ! cornell ! edu>
Date:       2001-01-04 20:18:01
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On Wed, Jan 03, 2001, Juergen Kahrs wrote:
> There are few postings here. Thats normal. Your posting was one of the
> more interesting ones. But why dont you wait for Dual-Athlons ?
> If it is "bang for your buck" that you are looking for, you should
> use Dual-Durons. Boards will be released officially within the next weeks.
> Boards for the masses will become available in summer 2001.

Hmmm...  An interesting suggestion that I probably should have
considered more before thinking primarily of Xeons (large cache
probably seduced me).  Thanks for steering me to think about this some
more.

So, pros and cons of xeons vs. athlons:

* Xeon's chipset (440GX) and accompanying motherboard (supermicro
  S2DGE) I'd be using is probably (much?) more reliable and
  well-supported under linux-smp than Athlons' (AMD 760/760MP) simply
  because they've been around longer and through many more iterations.

* Xeon's larger cache (1Mb on the dual 400's I'm considering) might
  give performance enhancement (and given that I don't have only a
  single scientific code I'm planning to run on this, it's probably not
  helpful to test benchmark specifically for my code).

* Athlons' significantly faster clock rate (along with full-speed L2
  cache in Thunderbirds, although at only 384kB) and much higher memory
  bandwidth with PC2100 DDR memory could help alot.

* Cost is unclear until 760MP boards and PC2100 memory are released,
  but it will probably be ~$950 to get two 1GHz 385kB L2 Thunderbirds,
  dual motherboard and 512Mb of ECC PC2100 vs ~$750 to get two 400MHz
  1Mb L2 Xeons, dual motherboard and 512Mb of ECC PC100.

So, any suggestions please?  Comments/corrections on above analysis?
General thoughts about stability speed of linux on smp athlons (not
sure if this is known yet)?  

Also, I've read that AMD has cancelled release of its Mustang
processor (Thunderbird with large L2 caches up to 4Mb for
workstation/server market), but little information is available on why
and how that affects smp with athlons.  Any comments?

Thanks so much for any pointers.  Hope I haven't bugged the list too
much as it is.

Take care,

Daniel


-- 
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University
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