[TriLUG] AMD64 vs. P4 & Linux

[Marty Ferguson]

No, no AMD64 experience,

but last year, I was on a 6 mo. contract to HP in Roseville, CA working
as a "firmware engineer" on their new Itanium-II server line.

The CPU's that are now shipping are a good bit better than those which
were used during product development in 2002.

I installed both RHEL and Debian almost daily, on these boxes.  I used
one of the dual-CPU 8-meg'r prototypes as my RH install server.

These puppys can sing.  Both the RH and the Debian distros regularly and
reliably installed without a hitch.  HP was sending prototypes to Industrial
Light & Magic at the time for early user feedback.  The boxes, from top to
bottom,
have really been wrung out. All of the environmental, temp, humidity, bla
bla bla
testing is all first rate, and Linux handles all of the Fan, Temp, intrusion
swithches
and etc.  Case, connectors, all of the mechanical design is top-notch. HP
has had a
flock of their own Linux on-staff experts involved in the kernel development
out in
Fort Collins, Colorado.

Go to this page:
http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/entry_level/index.html
To see the three members of the family.

The RX-2600 can be had for about XXxx$2500xxXX
(DAMN! They raised the price to $3,882 !!!)
http://www.hp.com/workstations/itanium/index.html
and will max out at 24GB of real RAM, which, yes, Linux
can address quite well, thankyou.

Moving 64 bits of data at 1.4GHZ is like moving 32 bits of data at 2.8GHZ.
The reason the AMDs are popular is that they run the old x-86 instruction
set on 64bit silicon.  So any "Legacy" application is guaranteed to run.
Even DOS, WordStar and SpaceInvaders  ;-)

Intel's Itaniums are not "backward compatible" and only run the new pure 64
bit
instruction set.  AMDs CPUs do not handle the new instruction set.  They
only run
the old 8/16/32 extended/bastardized instruction set.

Of course, the best Itanium-II compiler is still "gcc".  Even though the
Itanium
gcc complier has not been modified, optimized and enhanced to the extent of
the old X86 compilers, the CPUs themselves are still powerhouses, and things
will
only improve as the gnu compiler gurus continue to optimize.  The X86 is, by
now,
totally tweaked out.  There's no more water to squeeze out of that silcon
rock.

Based on the fact that you are a member of this group, you may want to
reconsider your choice.  Since any source (APT, or RPM .src) will compile
fine on the 64 bit hardware, and you are not stuck with only running MS
binaries, I believe that in the long run you would do best with the
low-end RX 2600  (his name is Wilson, in case you care.  Wilson kicks it
real good.)

So to summarize, I don't have benchmark data, but I know good stuff when I
work
with it.  These machines are well designed, tested, are highly reliable and
offer
high performance.  If you can afford the few extra bucks, you'll be very
happy indeed.


My 2 bits,
Marty


-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org]On
Behalf Of Hugh Crissman
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 8:39 PM
To: trilug at trilug.org
Subject: [TriLUG] AMD64 vs. P4 & Linux


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.

Hugh Crissman

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