[K12OSN] K12osn - OT 4-way Opteron or 2-way 4 core Xeon server?

[Petre Scheie]

I think you'd get more 'oomph' from the 4-way Opteron box than you would with a 2-way 
dual-core Xeon box.  Opterons have generally had better performance than Xeons, which is 
one of the main reasons AMD has had such good sales numbers for the past few years. 
Now, a 2-way quad-core Xeon box might outperform the Opteron box, since it has more 
cores available.  But all of this is predicated on your app being able to take advantage 
of having that many CPU cores.  And it depends on what the app does.  We have some perl 
scripts that parse huge XML files and load them into Oracle.  We moved them from a HP 
Itanium box (eight CPUs?  Can't recall exactly) to a handful of Opteron boxes because 
the parsing turned out to be CPU bound, and the Opterons could run rings around the HP 
box.  But as far as hosting the DB, it stays on the HP because it handles the IO better. 
  (We'd look at using clusters for the Oracle DBs, but we're being absorbed into another 
company, and it won't be our problem shortly).

Petre

Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> Dear Folks,
>  I am faced with the need to buy a big server for the business application
> that I'm moving from HP-UX to Linux. I am looking at 32GB memory and at
> least 4 processors. Gateway has a nice 4 way Opteron based server but
> only 2 way Xeon servers. Xeons come dual and quad core.
> 
>  Should I push for the more oomph with Xeons (is it more oomph?) for
> considerably (40%) more money, or will I be happy with 4 2.8GHz Opterons.
> The application is compiled and tested for 32 bit processors and will
> most probably stay that way for a while.
> 
> Thanks, julius
> 
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