[Beowulf] AMD 6100 vs Intel 5600

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Bill Broadley <bill at cse.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>> I would say that the 2x6-cores Magny-Cours probably has to be compared
>> to Nehalem-EX.
>
> Why?

Maybe first because that's where the core spaces from AMD and Intel
intersect (8-cores Beckton and 8-cores Magny-Cours). I'm not sure it's
really significant to compare performance between a 6-cores Westmere
and a 12-cores Magny-Cours. I feel it makes more sense to compare
apples to apples, ie. same core count.

And then, also maybe because they are the same MP class, not
dual-socket only. Meaning there are similarly equipped in terms of
memory channels and inter-CPU links (QPI or HT), to be associated
in platforms of 4 or more.

> Various vendors try various strategies to differentiate products based
> on features.  For the most part HPC types care about performance per $,
> performance per watt, and reliability.  I'd be pretty surprised to see large
> HPC cluster built out of Nehalem-EX chips.

Not entirely built out of Nehalem-EX, probably, but including a fair
share of this newly coming (again) SMP machines, I have no doubt.
Users, both academic and from the industry, have more and more needs
for huge amounts of memory, that can not easily be met using the
distributed memory approach. Nehalem-EX and Magny-Cours offers just
that, hundreds of GB or RAM. I know some people drooling right now at
the idea of putting their hands on a 1TB machine.

I'm totally in line with you on the price/perf points you made, though.

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian