[vox-tech] amd64

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Sun 18 Jan 04,  2:59 AM, Bill Broadley <bill@cse.ucdavis.edu> said:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 02:46:50PM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > hey,
> > 
> > has anybody built their own athlon64 / opteron machine yet?
> > anyone running one?
> 
> Yeah, I've got 4 on campus (3 duals and a quad).  I've had no problems
> with any of them.
 
excellent.  what motherboards are you running in the duals?

were they the "i saw a cool deal at frys" kind of purchase or the "i've
been reading chipset roundups on anandtech for months" type of purchase?

any motherboard recommendations for opteron SMP?


> In general the opteron has a substantial advantage in duals or quads,
> but still holds it's own in a single cpu system.  The AMD64s can run
> (and be competive) with a 32 bit OS, but has additional performance
> advantages in 64 bit mode, the largest being double the registers.

i just read that opterons have a north bridge for each CPU and that
there's no real common FSB.  i imagine that would have profound
performance boost for numerical work.  and gaming.  :)

> For the security minded out there, the amd64 also supports additional
> instructions to help prevent buffer overflows.

didn't hear that.  i'll have to read more about it -- this sounds OS
dependent to me.

> In general the AMD64s tend to be lower performance (and clock speed)
> then the intel competition (at the same perf level).
> 
> Keep in mind that the socket-754 AMD64 chips have a 64 bit memory
> interface, and the socket 940 have a 128 bit memory interface.
> 
> My next home upgrade is looking like it will be an amd64 or opteron.
> I'd be most worried about 3d drivers (if you want 3d) for a home machine.

bingo.  :)   i was trying to find a quasi-respectable way of asking "has
anyone run quake3 or UT on an opteron yet".

uhhh... i mean blender.   ;-)

pete

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