Opinions AMD64 vs EM64T vs Itanium II 2006-08-29 - By Ken Snider
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Collins, Kevin [MindWorks] wrote:
> Just wanted to say thanks for the many opinions that I have so far
> received. In our initial use, these servers will be for serving LDAP,
> VNC, HTTP, etc. Nothing where huge performance is required.
The prevailing wisdom, at least for our applications, is that the Opteron
platform, on AM2, is *far* better suited to Multi-processor (as you start
getting into honking big systems, as in 4-way+). The EM64T platform will not
scale in the same way. Because of this, we decided to standardize on Opteron,
because we didn't want micro-architecture oddities between 2-way EM64T and 4
-way+ AMD64 systems to become an issue.
There's a *great* Article about this at ArsTechnica here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060411-6581.html
Snippet here:
"AMD won't be introducing a major new CPU architecture to replace Hammer until
2007. In the meantime, the company plans to combat Intel's Conroe by exploiting
the edge that their combination of a more scalable, glueless multiprocessor
interconnect?coherent HyperTransport?with an on-die memory controller gives
them over Intel's aging FSB architecture and off-die memory controller.
For the consumer, these kinds of issues aren't going to have a direct impact on
performance or purchasing decisions. Consumers don't care that you can
gluelessly add new sockets, and that AMD's NUMA design means that the system's
aggregate bandwidth can scale right through the roof. This is because even high
-end consumer-level systems are going to have one socket, period, and in the
single-socket world of content creation and gaming benchmark bakeoffs Conroe's
shared-bus FSB and off-die memory controller won't hold it back. Not even when
the number of cores per chip increases will the AM2 + HT + on-die DDR2
combination give AMD a single-socket advantage over Intel, since there's only a
certain amount of bandwidth you can push through one lone socket, HT or no HT.
The main place where the influence of HT + AM2 + on-die DDR2 will be felt is in
the server market. Multisocket AMD boards will be cheaper to make, and they'll
have more aggregate memory bandwidth. Furthermore, in the realm of four sockets
and up, AMD's interconnect and memory bandwidth edge will probably be decisive.
"
Basically, we decided to go with an architecture that will scale as we do.
--Ken.
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