Opinions AMD64 vs EM64T vs Itanium II 2006-08-25 - By Paul Krizak
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While I'm obviously a bit biased, I would definitely suggest going with
an Opteron-based solution. AMD64 is the original x86-64 implementation
(EM64T is a clone of our architecture), and thus the linux community has
had more time to tweak the drivers, compilers, etc. to work with AMD64 cpus.
Also, going with AMD chips provides a long and stable upgrade path. You
can start with dual-core DDR2/667 chips in your blades, and then when
quad-core comes out, you'll be able to upgrade to quad-core DDR2/800+
chips and stay within the same power envelope.
AMD chips scale much better past four cores than Intel's chips, due to
Intel sticking with the antiquated front side bus architecture, whereas
AMD has high-speed HyperTransport links between each chip. When you get
those big beefy 4-socket 16-core blades, rest assured that the AMD
variety will perform much better than an equivalent Xeon configuration,
even if the 2-socket/4-core performance right now favors the Intel chips.
Paul Krizak 5900 E. Ben White Blvd. MS 625
Advanced Micro Devices Austin, TX 78741
Linux/Unix Systems Engineering Phone: (512) 602-8775
Silicon Design Division
Collins, Kevin [MindWorks] wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> we are in the process of buying some blades for our HP blade
> center to use for Linux servers. Since we are starting fresh, and I have
> no practical experience with Linux on 64-bit, I figured I would ask for
> input from the Taroon and Nahant list.
>
> Are there any technical reasons to prefer AMD64 (Opteron), EM64T (Xeon)
> or Itanium II CPUs? Are there things that don't work in RedHat on any of
> those platforms with either RHEL3 or RHEL4?
>
> Beyond that, we are currently running 32-bit on 32bit Xeon processors -
> I'm think I can also run 32-bit RedHat on either the AMD64 or EM64T
> chips - is that correct?
>
> I appreciate any comments.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kevin
>
>
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