Re: Quad Xeon or Quad Opteron?

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:41 AM, Andrzej Zawadzki <zawadaa(at)wp(dot)pl> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We're planning new production server for PostgreSQL and I'm wondering
> which processor (or even platform) will be better: Quad Xeon or Quad
> Opteron (for example SUN now has a new offer Sun Fire X4440 x64).
>
> When I was buying my last database server, then SUN v40z was a really
> very good choice (Intel's base server was slower). This v40z still works
> pretty good but I need one more.
>
> AFAIK Intel made some changes in chipset but... is this better then AMD
> HyperTransport and Direct Connect Architecture from database point of
> view? How about L3 cache - is this important for performance?
>

Intel's chipset is still broken when using dual sockets and quad core
processors. The problem manifests itself as excessive cache line bouncing.
In my opinion the best bang/buck combo on the CPU side is the fastest
dual-core Xeon CPUs you can find. You get excellent single-thread
performance and you still have four processors, which was a fantasy for most
people only 5 years ago. In addition you can put a ton of memory in the new
Xeon machines. 64GB is completely practical.

I still run several servers on Opterons but in my opinion they don't make
sense right now unless you truly need the CPU parallelism.

-jwb