[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Phil Stracchino]

Mark Benson wrote:
> Performance-wise, yeh, Intel are in front at the moment, by a yard- 
> arm, but you never know what AMD have up their sleeve. I guess by  
> offering both they can surf whatever wave fits, for performance or  
> economy. I'm pretty sure Sun's campaign for using servers with lower  
> power consumption will be boosted by the Intel CPU range over  
> Opterons also.

I have a suspicion any performance advantage won't last long, especially
on multi-core and multi-CPU configurations.  Intel has gone with their
own proprietary interconnect for multi-core/multi-CPU configurations,
and if you compare the specs to HyperTransport, well, it sort of does
most of what HyperTransport 1.0 does, with most of the performance, but
is new and unproven and can't do some things HyperTransport does.  AMD,
meanwhile, is projected to move to HyperTransport 3.0 sometime this or
next quarter, which (if memory serves) doubles the transfer rate again
over 2.0, allows for up to 32-way interconnects, and allows high-speed
interconnects not only across a board but between different boards, and
even between multiple chassis.  (Intel's in-house interconnect, if
memory serves, is 8-way at most and they all have to be on the same
physical board.)


-- 
 It's not the years, it's the mileage.
 Phil Stracchino              phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 Landline: 603-429-0220                Mobile: 603-320-5438