[Beowulf] I wanna know the performance difference between Intel Nocona and AMD Opteron

[Bill Broadley]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 08:12:18PM +0800, Henry_Xu at Dell.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> A friend of mine want to set up 32-node beowulf HPCC cluster. He has two
> hardware platform to choose. One is Intel nocona , the other is AMD
> Opteron.
> 
> Can anybody send me some articles related to :
> 
> 1. performance difference between those two platforms on 32-bit
> computing;
> 2. performance difference between those two platforms on 64-bit
> computing;

This depends on your application.  Any generalization could be
significantly incorrect for a given application.  Buying 32 nodes based
on some generalization could lead to significantly less performance per $
on your application.

If your power/cooling isn't free I'd also look at power usage, I've seen
power/cooling costs approach 50% of a 3 year cost to own for a $3k system.

In general a dual opteron has around twice the memory bandwidth and
lower power usage than the nocona.  Additionally the new 90nm opterons
use even less power (per MHz).

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis