[rescue] Sun crushes the used Sun market

[Shawn Wallbridge]

On 5-Jul-05, at 10:54 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo 717-201-3366 wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 23:45, Aaron Finley wrote:
>> Just curious, if you guys had to build a PC today, I'm assuming you'd
>> build an Opteron over a Xeon ?
>>
>> E.g. Let's say Supermicro X6DA8 + 2x 3.2 800FSB vs. Tyan K8SE + 2x
>> Opteron 246.
>>
>> Easy choice?
>
> Opteron wins in two ways:  better CPU performance, and better memory 
> bandwidth.
>
> --Patrick

Yes and no. We did _VERY_ thorough benchmarks of the applications we 
use (both 2D compositing and 3D Rendering [0]) comparing the Nocona 
based Xeon's (EM64T) and the Opteron and for the same price, they both 
performed VERY similar. The Opteron did edge out the Xeon on situations 
where memory was really stressed, but _most_ of the real world 
benchmarks were very very close (99.98% IIRC). We also testing in both 
XP and XPx64 (unfortunately with 32bit Binaries).

This was comparing equivalent _priced_ machines (Supermicro X6DALB2 
3.2GHz Xeon's vs Tyan S2891 w/ Opteron 246's). We had actually decided 
on the Xeon's but changed our mind when I confirmed with Intel that the 
dual core Xeon's wouldn't be compatible with current boards.

We ended up ordering 130 Dual Opteron 246's on the Tyan S2891 board 
with 2x1GB Ram and 120GB Seagate S-ATA HD's in Chenbro RM216 cases. 
They should have been in this week, but it looks like it will be next 
week now.

But, personally, I will be buying an Opteron for myself (probably with 
the Tyan S2895 board, dual PCI-E x16 is _nice_).

shawn

[0]
2D: Digital Fusion (half a dozen different flows)
3D: 3dsmax scanline renderer, Brazil, VRay, Gelato, PRMan testing all 
kinds of scenes