Opteron MP pwnz

[NTBlowz]

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003May/gee20030509019940.htm

It certainly pwned 4X Xeon and 2X faster than 4X Itanium 2

[Deviant]

Looking good, but thats just a couple of benchmarks. I want to see some more.

[Unicorn]

Is it reasonable to compare Opteron(1.8ghz) at double the clock of the Itanium(900mhz)? Are those the speeds that will be released to the market at somewhere around the same price?

[Deviant]

Yes it is reasonable, as thats what the speed are out there, and remember they also compare it with a 3GHz Xeon processor, is that fair? Yes cause thats what you can use in the real world, but the 3GHz is the slowest of the three.

The Opteron is ther cheapest option AFAIK.

[Unicorn]

Shock horror .. the Opteron is restricted to 1 terabyte of RAM! CFD geeks must be supergeeks!

Many people are starting to bump against the memory address limitations of 32-bit computing when running large CFD calculations. Moving to 64-bit computing raises the memory address limit from 2^32 (4 gigabytes) to 2^64 (16 exabytes) although it should be noted that the Opteron uses 40-bit physical memory addressing putting the limit at 1 terabyte of physical memory. (An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes and a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.) Such a change will be essential for running next generation CFD problems utilizing millions of grid points.

[NTBlowz]

The 900Mhz Itanium 2 should cost about US$4000, while Opteron 1.8Ghz cost less than US$1000 (the 1.4Ghz one cost less than US$300)