Author: Jay Urbanski
Date: 20:42:11 12/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On December 08, 2003 at 00:12:38, Eugene Nalimov wrote: >I don't believe there is 3x price difference between Opteron and Itanium >systems, at least for quad ones. For quads, you're probably right - it's more likely two to one. For duals (compared to 1.5ghz Itaniums) I maintain it's closer to 3. >I also don't think there is lot of software written for Opteron out there as >well. I think the opposite is true -- there is more native Itanium software than >there is native Opteron software :-) I beg to differ. 32-bit x86 software is arguably just a "native" to Opteron as x86-64 applications. Unless you are going to buy one of these systems exclusively to run crafty, this makes all the difference in the world. I would estimate the number of people using Itanium systems to run chess engines rounds to zero. Let us also speculate that Intel may at some point extend the Xeon to 64-bits (they pretty much have to unless they intend to cede the x86 market to AMD, and I don't think they're that stupid). Native x86-64 applications will then be legion. I think your employer may have some influence in this as they're already developing a 64-bit version of Windows for Opteron. It would boggle the mind to think they would develop yet another incompatible 64-bit version of Windows for Xeon. >I have both quad Itanium2 and Opteron in my office. For Crafty Opteron is >somewhat faster -- after lot of work. Without that work single-CPU Opteron was >faster than single-CPU Itanium2, but quad Itanium2 was faster than quad Opteron. > >Lot of bright people worked to speed up Crafty on Opteron, including lead >developers of NT :-) Not sure that some arbitrary application will have such >attention. >You can look at TPC-C results for quad Opteron and Itanium systems. I think you >would be surprised. You can also look at the TPC-C results for Opteron with more >than 4 CPUs -- and please let me know when you'll find those results. I don't maintain that Opteron is used in large SMP systems to the extent that Itanium is today. But I do maintain that when they are, they will deliver better price performance than Itanium and allow one to run many more applications. Itanium can't run 32-bit applications worth squat - this matters to a whole lot of people.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.