INTEL XEON vs AMD ATHLON

[Rocky McGaugh]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Ivan Oleynik wrote:

> 
> I think this is old question, but I would like to know what experts
> say: Is it really true that the new Xeon is superior than Athlon as far as
> heavy numerical calculations in cluster environment are concerned?
> 
> Ivan Oleynik
> 

Some thoughts to consider:

The Xeon (on the 7500) *can* be vastly superior in certain circumstances.  
It has three major pluses. 

The first is its greater memory bandwidth. The E7500 uses interleaved DDR.
This gives it roughly twice the memory bandwidth of the Athlon solutions.

The second is its greater PCI bandwidth. The E7500 performs much better 
than the Athlon motherboards.
http://www.conservativecomputer.com/myrinet/perf.html

The third is the availability of specialized compilers. This may or may 
not be a big win for you.


In general, they are both excellent processors. I would have to say that 
the Xeon has a much, much better motherboard available for it though. We 
just fired up 544 of the Tyan S2720's the other day, and had 0 board 
failures during the first 25 days or so. Had that been Athlons, we 
probably would have had 10 failures.

I (we) still like the Athlon and still sell alot of it, but the 
reliability isn't nearly what the S2720 has shown.

Good luck with your cluster...:)

-- 
Rocky McGaugh
Atipa Technologies
rocky at atipatechnologies.com
rmcgaugh at atipa.com
1-785-841-9513 x3110
http://1087800222/
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