Dragonfly and Hyperthreading....

[EM1897 at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/8/2005 4:25:09 PM Eastern Standard Time, Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>
>: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.

Well I've got 2000 intel systems in the field and I've 
never had one "melt down". Perhaps your problem is 
that you are fiddling with multi-cpu systems all the
time? Then again, one doesn't exactly make much of a
case. There's no point to SMP for me, since none of
the BSDs benefit much from it.  And I've never had a 
customer complain that the systems have Intel 
processors. Not once. Maybe one or two about the
blowers being a bit loud, but if I had to double 
the price to sell opterons, or had them locking up 
because of the crappy VIA chipsets, I'd get much worse complaints than a bit of noise.

There's also a difference in the "stability" required
for engineering use, and the stability required
for a machine that is pushing 70K pps and hammering
a database 24 hours a day. Locking up once a week
may not be that bad, but its unacceptable for me. I've
had VIA chipsets lock up regularly when many people
would swear they are "rock-solid". Once every 6 months
on the desktop will happen every week on a heavily
loaded system.