On Feb 12, 2005, at 9:54 AM, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
Howdy -
On Wednesday and Thursday I put together a new dual Opteron-250 system and installed SuSE 9.2 (64bit). Uneventful install but there were a few issues with rebuilding a few apps (all but one have been resolved - can't get Ogle to build so I'll use Xine instead).
Today I've been putting the Opteron system thru its paces and I have
to say the Opteron/AMD64 has impressed the hell out of me.
The Opteron-250 with its 2.4GHz clock is about *2X* faster than the
2GHz G5/PPC system I have! What took 34 hours to run on the G5 (or the
Athlon-MP/2800 that the Opteron replaced - the Athlon-MP and G5 were
quite similar in speed) is only going to take about 16 hours on the
Opteron-250.
Interesting. What was the off-the-shelf price for the Opteron? The Opteron prices I've seen have been higher than the Apple G5 prices, but maybe not 2x more.
A more fair match to Opteron is probably the Power5, which has previously been priced way out of reach of normal people. It's changing though; there's now an entry-level system for $4799.
A $/fps comparison between different systems would be nice. y4mdenoise is IMO a good benchmark.
y4mdenoise is getting about 2.7 frames/sec on the Opteron and about
1.3 frames/sec on the G5. How much of that difference can be attributed
to the 64bit operation on the Opteron I do not know (OS/X is still
32bit userland until 10.4 comes out in a couple months).
64bit is generally slower than 32bit. The only benefit of 64bit is non-segmented addressing of several gigabytes of data. If you don't need that then 64 bit adressing is just overhead.
It's an urban myth that 64bit is faster than 32bit, like people assume a 2GHz computer is twice as fast as a 1GHz computer.
That is also why Apple have been reluctant to make a 64 bit Mac OS X, since the people who actually need it already buy AIX instead. Ditto for Windows.
Pity the Opteron-252 (2.6GHz clock) wasn't quite on the shelves yet
when I placed the order :)
The currently highest performing configuration is never the most valuable, since there will always be people who are willing to pay premium for the baddest setup so it's disproportionally expensive. OTOH, if yours *was* the currently baddest setup, then you *did* pay a premium :)
I can get used 1GHz P3s for $50 now. A cluster of 100 of those is faster than a $5000 badass computer (for appropriate things like y4mdenoise). The electrical bill would kill me though! :)
/Roine
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