Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 23:49:03 01/30/03
Go up one level in this thread
On January 30, 2003 at 14:24:27, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On January 30, 2003 at 13:28:42, Christopher A. Morgan wrote: > >>Question re dual processor differences. >> >>Tiger Direct offers a dual AMD MP 2200+ for $1,650, and a dual Intel Xeon 2.4 >>for $3,000. Both without an operating system. >> >>What difference in performance would I expect between these two machines? The >>AMD dual at roughly ½ the price seems to be the much better buy, although the >>Xeon should have HT, I believe? >> >>For a Windows operating system which is better (I am a single user, no network >>use, no server use), Win XP Pro or Win 2000 Pro? >> >>Thanks! > > >there are plenty of people here that can give you a good performance comparison >between the two. From what I have seen, AMD generally has the performance edge >until you step into the dual market. Then you have to be very careful as several >AMD >tests posted here by others (not by me as I have no AMD boxes here at all) >suggest that >the AMD duals have a memory bottleneck that limits performance. However, it is >also likely that there are both good and bad chipsets for supporting duals. >Intel has >a "workstation" class dual xeon chipset and a "server" class chipset. The >server class >chipset has better memory performance. > >It it were _my_ money, I would benchmark the program(s) I want to run on the box >before making the decision. As I said, there are certainly bad AMD chipsets for >duals. There are _also_ bad Intel chipsets for duals. > >Common sense says "benchmark" or get data directly from someone that has the >_specific_ chipset you are looking at. > >All duals are not created equal. Hyper-threading is yet another issue. >Remember >that you have to run two threads to take full advantage of one physical CPU. On >AMD >this is not true. Hyper-threading speeds things up significantly. But that >second thread >also has a cost, particularly if you don't have a second thread to run. :) There are only 2 dual-CPU chipsets for Socket A. They are the AMD 760 and AMD 760MPX. Both of my duals are based on the 760MPX. There may be performance difference; the only listed difference I could find was the memory footprint. I posted my numbers a while back. My AthlonMP 2000 system had something like 1.5 MN/sec. My AthlonMP 1600 had something like 1.1 MN/sec. IIRC, your dual Xeon 2.8 GHz was ~2.1 MN/sec, yes? Extrapolating to AthlonMP 2400, it would not quite match 2.1 MN/sec, though it would be close and -much- cheaper. Just like you, I believe the issue is a memory bottleneck. The SMP chipset squanders valuable bus cycles. Intel's chipsets use interleaving to give each processor "dedicated" bandwidth. -Matt
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