[K12OSN] Just about ready to make a purchase

[Les Mikesell]

Dan Young wrote:

>>>> Opterons kick some serious bits when it comes to RAM access. During
>>>> testing prior to the APS installation, I determined that a single chip
>>>> dual core 2.6 GHz Opteron could perform about 30% faster than the same
>>>> setup with a dual core 2.8 GHz Xeon.
>>> How long ago was that?  The intel core2 and quad core cpus have
>>> leapfrogged AMDs in recent benchmarks.
>>>
>> Yes that's true for single dual core cpu's. But when you scale up to 8
>> cores I don't know if I have seen any multitasking benchmarks for that
>> situation. It's annoying that most benchmarks are for games.
> 
> Here's an interesting review of an 8-way Opteron:
> http://tweakers.net/reviews/674
> 
> Read to the end where they note that some apps ran _slower_ on an 8-way
> than a 4-way. Performance also varied wildly with different applications.
> 
> Basically, it seems like it's hard to predict how a platform will
> perform until you try it on _your workload_.

Most benchmarks run a single app which then has to do some contortions 
to spread the work across CPUs.  Multiuser servers will naturally be 
running many copies of applications at once and don't have to do 
anything special.

Has anyone tried the 8-core Mac Pro as a k12ltsp server yet?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     les at futuresource.com