Re: [gentoo-user] hardware advice for dual-processor set-up on gentoo

[Denis <denis.che@gmail.com>]

Bob, 

Thanks for that detailed write-up.  I don't pretend to have any
understanding of the architecture of the new dual-core Opterons, but I
did want to clarify a couple things...

I was under the impression that the Opterons didn't have the same type
of a NorthBridge bottleneck that Intel processors experience and were
thus quite a bit more efficient in the way they integrate with RAM and
themselves!...  In fact, from reading the numbers posted on the AMD
website comparing FSB and memory bandwidth, the numbers for the
Opteron were much superior to those for Intel.  Reading what you wrote
would make me think that the numbers AMD published were some kind of a
marketing ploy??

The numbers I am referring to are in this PDF:
http://multicore2.amd.com/Products/CompetitiveComparisons/2P_Server_Comparison.pdf

Also, I read on more than one occasion that the DDR2-400 and DDR2-533
suffer from latency issues and perform more sluggishly than their DDR1
counterparts as of right now......

I mean, out of most benchmarks I've read, it looked like an Opteron
comes out on top compared to the Irwindale Xeons (even with their 2MB
L2 cache) including floating-point arithmetic, only with the exception
of matrix multiplication...  Also, it appears that the dual-core
Opterons have true multithreading as opposed to Intel's seemingly
superficial Hyperthreading?

I've been using Intel-only products so far in my computer experiences,
and this is the first time I am considering buying a non-Intel system,
so I want to make sure I understand enough about both processors to
make an educated decision.

You mentioned compilers...  Do you HAVE to use those instead of the
standard GCC stuff?  I've never used anything but GCC before for
compiling things.

Thanks!

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