[Beowulf] AMD 6100 vs Intel 5600

[Bill Broadley]

On 04/01/2010 12:59 AM, Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
> I'm not convinced, is the number of cores more important that agg. performance
> and price? Also, if you turn on SMT/HT on a 6-core westmere it may appear
> very similar to a 12-core Magnycour (performance, appearance, price, ...).

I'd be interested in the details if it works out that way.  I've seen HT 
help on real codes on the order of 10-20%.  I've not seen it help 
anywhere close to a factor of 2.  The spec results posted use 
hypethreading and still showed a substantial Magnycour advantage.

The main advantage I've seen is that a dual socket intel node with 2
sockets can handle 16 jobs with 1.5G each or 8 jobs with 3.0 GB each 
without a significant throughput penalty.  On AMD systems you lose 
approximately half the throughput.

> My experience is that in HPC it always boils down to price/performance and
> that would in my eyes make apples out of Magnycour and Westmere.

Agreed.  Large number of sockets or large NUMA systems seem to be more 
specialized tools because of their higher cost.  Justified by some 
applications, but not my general HPC workloads.