[TriLUG] AMD64 vs. P4 & Linux

[Ed Hill]

On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 20:39, Hugh Crissman wrote:
> Recently I have been doing some hardware shopping. I have been looking
> at the AMD 64 bit processor and P4 processors. Does anyone have any
> experience running linux on the AMD64? What is the performance like? How
> do you think it compares to the P4? All the benchmarks I have found are
> windows OS comparisons. Thanks for any input anyone might have.


Hi Hugh,

I have a dual Opteron-240 (Arima HDAMB motherboard) machine under my
desk at work and its currently running RHEL AS v3 for AMD64.  Its great
for compute-intensive tasks such as building and testing our code
(http://mitgcm.org).  And, over the past few months, its been stable
using both SuSE Linux 9.0 (x86-64) and RHEL AS v3.  

So far, I've had no problems with x86 software compatibility.  Linux
i386 binaries run just fine.  The only problem we've experienced is
driver support for certain hardware (eg. NICs) but one can always swap
them in/out.  I'm sure the driver situation will improve since AMD64 is
gaining in popularity.

In terms of speed, I suggest you look for benchmarks that best match
your workloads on sites such as:

  http://www.aceshardware.com/
  http://anandtech.com/

hth,
Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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