[vox-tech] AMD Hammer, Athlon 64, Opteron...

[Bill Broadley]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 02:40:05PM -0500, Mike Simons wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 10:37:37AM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 01:06:23PM -0500, Mike Simons wrote:
> > > - Anyone played with a AMD Hammer system yet?
> > 
> > Er, yes, did you have a question about them?
> 
>   I was looking for a non-AMD performance opinion of them... 
> compared to what's on the market now.

Well the biggest performance differences (vs AMD XP):
*  Main memory latency is halved (via an onchip memory controller)
*  Double the registers (decreases register pressure)
*  Main memory = 128 bits @ 333 Mhz (vs 64 bits @ 266 or 333 Mhz today)
*  3 seperate 6.4 GB/sec HyperTransport channels
*  Full SSE2 support (faster floating point)

Performance of course depends on clock rate, which hasn't been announced.
The 1.2 Ghz Opteron benchmarks I've seen place it at about p4-2.2 Ghz
performance on average.  Of course I expect the opterons to ship in
April to be faster.

The most unique part of the Opteron is each cpu has it's own seperate
memory system, unlike any other setup I know of.  That combined with 
the HyperTransport channels should make for better scaling with
multiple cpu's then any other architecture I know of.

>   Hrmmmm... so in theory by changing only the kernel boot disks you'd
> be able to install the i386 version, that interesting.

I believe so.

> - Does the kernel/hardware support running a mix of 32/64 bit
>   applications?

Yes.

>   I suspect that a amd64 native (i386-64 or whatever name) port of the 
> debian packages will be made, (kinda like sparc32, sparc64).  So I'm
> wondering if anyone has heard of a group working on that...

Sounds likely, I haven't.

> > I expect the x86-64 Opteron based servers to be announced sometime
> > in April.  The Athlon 64 however has been rumored to have been delayed
> > till Sept.
> 
>   Well as long as they don't continue to delay the release for a
> multiple years like Intel did with the EPIC/ia64, AMD should be fine.

I'm hoping so, it's a cool architecture.  For the security hacks out there,
I was reading:
	 http://tinyurl.com/5nya

It mentions some interesting details that allow for improving security
on most architectures (NOT including ia32).  I've heard that the x86-64
indeed does support those features, and that the group is considering
supporting x86-64 instead of the "open" Sparc chip that Sun's been so
cagey on the details with.


> 
>     Thanks,
>       Mike
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-- 
Bill Broadley
Mathematics
UC Davis