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Hardware Selection for AMD64 + Linux?
MrClever asks: "After a disaster involving my cat, a pot of coffee and my workstation, I am now in the market for a new machine. I thought I'd jump on the AMD64 wagon and keep running Linux. After some initial investigation, it became clear that ATi, Promise and other manufacturers don't have 64bit drivers for Linux, which rules out most motherboards with onboard P/SATA RAID, thus limiting my available choices. I know you can run 32bit on AMD64, but if I wanted that I'd get an AthlonXP. So, what AMD64 hardware is the best supported in 64bit mode under Linux? Seems NVidia have 64bit drivers, does anyone else?"
Having twice the general purpose registers will typically improve performance 10-20% just by recompiling everything into 64 bit mode. The grandparent is smoking some major crack.
Having twice the general purpose registers will typically improve performance 10-20% just by recompiling everything into 64 bit mode.
Data please? this thread mentions povray, well this povray benchmark site clearly shows that the $259 amd64 chip is slower than the $200 Intel offering.
this site has some benchmarks. Note that they use gcc for the pentium machines, which is not a very good optimizing compiler. For floating point apps, I typically see 2x speedup when using the Intel compiler (like oggenc, povray, etc). I cannot say which is faster, but being that there is no good (free) compiler for the amd64 you will just have to take the numbers for what they are (meaningless).
The grandparent is smoking some major crack.
Damn, I've gotta be more discreet.
Ummm... Lay down the crack, man. The AMD64 platform offers many more advantages than just it's 64-bitness.
First, the Opteron has an integrated memory controller. That means FAST memory access. If you are running two of them on a dual-channel board, you get a really fast NUMA configuration. That's very important for applications that actually need to calculate stuff, assuming your OS supports it.
Second, it has twice the number of registers. That gives you a large performance advantage over IA-32 because apps don't need to constantly swap out variables into RAM.
Third, the Opteron has 1 meg of L2 cache. That is twice than what Athlon 64 or Mac G5 has, for about the same price. It sure as hell makes a difference, even for normal desktop use.
Also, I see no reason whatsoever to buy an expensive pre-built system when a really nice machine can be put together in a few hours for well under $900. I just upgraded my workstation to an Opteron 140 for only about $600. That's with a server-class board, 400W power supply, and 512 megs of DDR400 registered ECC RAM. Apple doesn't even offer the same features, and a comparable machine costs about $2000 from them. Not to mention that OS X is 32-bit.