On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 03:28:42PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > In a meeting today we looked at three options from HP and were told that > Sun wants to compete with HP and match prices. The three HP options > differed primarily in terms of the CPUs: Intel v. AMD. With AMD we could > get cheaper DDR2 RAM but with Intel we would have to buy pricier DDR3 RAM. > All could take SATA 3G HDDs with a RAID controller that would allow us to > use RAID1 (simple mirroring) with two 1TB drives per unit. All were > dual-socket quad-core machines, thus 8 cores per unit. I was thinking 4GB > RAM per core or 32GB RAM per unit. They are 1U rack mountable. > > These are the two machines that we focused on most: > > HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Server (with Intel Xeon X5550) > http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3884343.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN > > HP ProLiant DL165 G5 Server (with AMD Opteron 2384) > http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3580133.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN > > With the configurations we were shown, the Intel was $2995 and the AMD was > $1769, but those prices would increase with added RAM and probably with > added HDD space. > > We decided that we need to do some testing to compare the two machines, > and we have a couple of machines available. So I'm going to run some of > my genome-scanning code to see how the machines perform. > > > Do any of you have any opinions on these options, especially Xeon v. > Opteron? I was told that Xeon was always faster but Opteron was cheaper. > For some jobs Xeon was 20% faster and for some it was 100% faster. My > guess is that I will do better, for my work, with a larger number of > cheaper processors, but I'm going to do some testing. One important point that is often overlooked in these Intel-vs-AMD comparisons is the effective memory bandwidth. Most genomic applications are constrained by the memory access time, not as much by the CPU itself. Under my desk I have an older Dell dual-core (Xeon CPU 5140 @ 2.33GHz) and a newer HP quad-core (Xeon E5440 @ 2.83GHz). My application uses around 1 GB of RAM, and on a theoretical computer it should scale linearly with the number of cores (it computes some similarity measure between 10000 'strings'), but in the actual real-world, the dual core finishes in 8 hours and the quad-core in 7 and a half, despite the fact that all 6 CPUs are 100% busy. The Dell dual-core has FB-DIMM 1666 and the HP quad-core has DDR3 1333. Note that the quad-core is not the newer i7/Nehalem chips, but the older 'two dual cores on a piece of silicon, fighting over the same FSB'. Cheers, florin -- Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/1fa02c06/attachment-0001.pgp