[rescue] System Upgrade Drive (sort of)

[Nathan Raymond]

Short answer: AMD has very affordable 8-core CPUs and while the
performance-per-Mhz and power efficiency isn't as good as Intel, if you're
doing virtualization the hardware costs are lower for the equivalent
performance compared to Intel.  Power efficiency becomes a bigger deal in a
data center where cooling costs are a bigger factor, and
performance-per-Mhz will matter more for HPC applications (though this is
sometimes offset by GPU compute, depending on the application).

AMD's 8-core CPUs range from $150-$200 (FX-8120 through FX-8350).  Intel's
8-core CPUs range from $1140-$1935 (Xeon E5-2450 through E5-2687W).

Another perk of AMD is that it's a lot cheaper to put a system together
with ECC RAM (just pick the right 890FX or 770 series chipset motherboard,
i.e. many ASUS or Gigabyte AMD boards support ECC, though you will need to
download the motherboard manuals or check forums to verify the support).
 Intel has created entirely separate CPU and chipset product lines that
cost more for their ECC support.

- Nate


On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Michael-John Turner <mj at mjturner.net>wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 04:30:11PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > I'm going to go for an AMD FX-6300 six-core or FX-8320 eight-core
> > processor, and would like to put 32G of RAM (maxing out the board)
> > if possible.
>
> As a matter of interest, why are you sticking with AMD? I agree that those
> CPUs give lots of bang-for-buck but wouldn't the lower power consumption of
> an Intel setup be cheaper in the long run for a system that's on 24/7?
>
> Just curious as I'm looking at a similar spec AMD setup vs its Intel
> equivalent for a home virtualisation server.
>
> -mj
> --
>  Michael-John Turner
>  mj at mjturner.net      <>     http://mjturner.net/
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