Originally posted by: aweber1nj
Check this past week's PCWeek. They did a comparison test of dual Xeon vs. dual Opteron Wkstations. Apparently the Opteron is excellent when you're single-threading (anyone, anyone? Buhler?), but as you increase the number of procs running in your OS the Xeon blows it away.
Would splurge for the new EM64 flavor of Xeon if you can fit it in the budget, but the test was the 32bit Xeon vs. the Opteron (again, I think it was running 32bit Win2K).
No Xeons are not faster anyway.
Actually multiprocessing opterons are best performers in world, even over the G5 plataform.
The reasons:
Bottleneck problems are solved with Hypertransport and the built-in memory controller. The Opteron architecture easily scales to eight CPUs.
Traditionally, communication between the hard drives, AGP/PCI cards, memory and CPU have been slowed by having to pass through various controller and Bridge Chips on the motherboard. With Hypertransport, AMD has allowed components to talk to each directly.
The on-CPU memory controller lowers latencies because it gives direct access to RAM. The memory controller also clocks in at CPU speed. Multi-processor systems have traditionally been hampered by memory latencies - after all, you have to feed all those processors information. This is where the competition can't keep up.