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"Typical SMP benchmarks in HPC show about a 30% gain with 2 CPUs over one on a Xeon/P4 platform. The same tests on Opteron show an 80% gain"
On the surface, this is hardly believable, considering that going from one way to two way provides the biggest boost in performance for "conventional" SMP systems, including Xeon's. Further increases in CPU count, because of the various interconnect bottle necks and overhead, don't result in as much performance.
I know from reading that the multiple Hypertransport links and memory connects are supposed to give AMD Opteron's a big boost, I wouldn't have guessed that much. But then, IBM and all these other folks (inluding at the national labs) have some pretty big multi CPU Opteron systems under construction, the largest I know of 128 way...
I've roughly verified this 30% performance boost figure Xeon's on a dual Xeon workstation we have in our lab ("You've got a Dell, Dude!), but I imagine it will be the end of the year or later before I can personally verify the Opteron number. :W
~Jon
Earth First!
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We'll screw up the other planets later....