Dragonfly and Hyperthreading....

[David Xu]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
:In a message dated 3/8/05 4:47:28 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
:mhellwig at xxxxxxxxx writes:
:<cut - your'e probably right>
:> point, Intel is still the best X86 Server platform except its CPU
:> problem.
::
::Well thanks god their are not in the CPU biz ;-)
:
:>From a price/performance standpoint Intel still leads by a wide margin.
:You can't touch a 3.2Ghz intel system at the same price point with
:AMD. Intel's chipsets are better, they are better supported by every
:OS vendor, and frankly you'd have to be a complete fool, at this point
:in time, to use anything else. You can blabber on about SMP
:architechture all you want, but the truth of the matter is that only
:linux has a usable SMP OS, and I doubt many of you use
:that. Paying twice as much for (perhaps) a wee-bit more performance
:while substantially increasing the likelihood of instability or having
:problems is just amateurish. Unless you have nothing else to do
:with your time.

    Well, I have the opposite opinion.  I tend to prefer AMD over Intel
    and the main reason is the amount of power the systems eat and the
    amount of heat they produce.  I'm sure everyone has their favorite
    horror story about melting down cpus, but in the last year I've blown
    up more Intel systems from heat then AMD (one Intel and zero AMDs,
    which means nearly none of either), so I'm not inclined to buy the
    meltdown argument.  Intels do not gracefully degrade as well as Intel
    would have you believe!  And my AMD boxes are no more or less stable 
    then my Intel boxes, so I don't buy the stability argument either.  
    I would love to see AMD be more proactive with regards to opening up 
    the chipset support, but that is pretty much my only complaint.

    Equivalent AMD systems are certainly not twice as expensive as Intel.
    The premium is typically less then $100, usually due to the MB and a
    slight premium on the cpu, but that's it.
Matt, I am not defeating AMD either, its CPU is really cool, I just
does not have confidence with its chipset strategy, I have very bad
experience with NVIDIA chipset and obviously it is best praised
chipset in AMD world, when we are talking about platform,
it is not just about CPU, in most cases, chipsets and other supports
are more important than CPU. I just heard even if a NDA license
is impossible from the chipset company. If anyone can make my
nForce 3 ultra network adapter work in BSD world, I will appreciated
it, current I have to insert a very cheap realtek 8139 into PCI slot,
I wasted my money on NVIDIA, this is rather annoying.
					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
David Xu