3d station recommendations

[skala67]

Intel has the "Dual Core" Xeon, which can also use their hyperthreading technology too. So I guess this would give you 2 chips per socket + 2 virtual processors, so 4 threads per socket. Has anyone heard anything about these? Pros, Cons. ( I have a machine with Dual Xeon 2.8 Dual cores on the way, so I will let you know, but for now what have people heard or tried?)

 

cheers,

[marvins_dad]

Since we're talking about Opterons:

 

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29195

 

... would be a great opportunity to snag a pair of dual cores and put the old opterons into a dedicated render slave!

 

Cheers

 

Oooh - nice! Might have to wait a month - was looking at the 265's and 270's.

[marvins_dad]

Intel has the "Dual Core" Xeon, which can also use their hyperthreading technology too. So I guess this would give you 2 chips per socket + 2 virtual processors, so 4 threads per socket. Has anyone heard anything about these? Pros, Cons. ( I have a machine with Dual Xeon 2.8 Dual cores on the way, so I will let you know, but for now what have people heard or tried?)

 

cheers,

 

I've ran across alot of comparisons between the Opteron and Intel's, but I can't remember if they were specifically talking about the Xeons or not. For some reason I can't find the page that I found the data, but it came down to that Intel's dual cores ran in emulation mode in 32 bit mode and ran fast in 64 bit, which would make it much slower than the AMD's Opteron - seeing as how not many people are using 64 bit because of lack of support drivers for video cards and other devices it didn't make sense to purchase that chip at this time.

As soon as I went to quote that statement I couldn't find the website I found that info from, but I did find one that tells you which chips do run 32 bit apps - however this still doesn't explain which ones work in emulation mode or not.

Check out this webpage...

http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,92083,00.html

 

Unfortunately, Intel developers early on opted for an architecture that's completely different from the common x86 (also known as IA-32) standard. The resulting platform has to resort to an inefficient emulation mode to run 32-bit applications.

 

Here's another good article if you got the time...

http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/04/22/duel_of_the_titans/

It looks a bit different in the workstation tests, where the Dual Xeon manages to overtake the Opteron team. However, these results are only included because the Dual Opteron will also be available as a workstation option. They give us an interesting picture of the performance of the Opterons compared to desktop CPUs like Athlon XP and Intel P4.

[jonel]

maybe i've posted it before, but techreport.com has very nice reviews regarding opterons and other cpu's

 

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/index.x?pg=7

[marvins_dad]

I haven't visited in a while, but I did get two new Boxx 5400 Workstations and a dedicated Render Node 7401.

 

I'm not done optimizing for performance, but they seem to be good machines so far.

 

I have a big render job coming up this weekend so we will see how they fair.

[McG]

I have a dell with dual 3.2 xeon chips in it, 2gb ram, 2(74gb 10k rpm hd's in raid 0) and a fire gl 128 mb vid card, and the thing is a beast. I have crashed it once because a rendering was too much but thats been the only time. If i had to change anything i would have gotten 4gb of ram and the 256 card or put my own card in it rather than having to choose what dell had. But i have had no problems with it. Interesting, I have rendered with and without hyperthreading, and there is not much of a difference at all. It is cool to hit ctrl+alt+delete and see 4 processor boxes there though.

[Greg Hess]

AMD Dual cores are currently the performance and performance/cost leaders. This may change in the next 6 months, but right now, even single dual core Athlon's put Intel's lineup to utter and complete shame.

 

Its pretty depressing when you sit there with your dual 2.8 Xeon, running Vray (with its four buckets going), and a 2 ghz Opteron dual core blasts past your system like it was sitting still.

 

Basically if you wanted a crazy fast system, and didn't have alot of money to throw around, a single processor dual core system running an X2, FX, or 16x series opteron or faster, will blow past most non amd systems.

 

In fact, Intel's own new coreduo seems to be beating their previous P4 architectures by an impressive margin. People are buying 2 ghz laptops and watching them out render their dual 3 ghz Xeon machines.

 

And all this assumes we are talking purely 32 bit operating systems and 32 bit programs.

 

Here's some quick clips from the egz vray benchmark off the vray forums.

 

A dual 2.8 Xeon renders the same scene in 6 minutes and 20.5 seconds. (HT enabled)

A single AMD X2 4200+ (2.2 ghz X2 Dual core) renders the scene in 5 minutes 58.9 seconds.

A dual 270 opteron (2.0 ghz Dual core x (4 total)) renders the scene in 3 minutes 24.8 seconds.

A dual 285 opteron (ludicrous speed) renders the scene in 2 min 24 seconds. (4x 2.6 ghz)

 

I'd say right now, a Single 2.0 ghz dual core AMD is roughly equivilant to (or faster then) TWO 2.8-3.0 ghz Xeon processors (with HT enabled).

 

From the intel side of things, a single 1.8-2.0 CoreDuo is roughly equivilant to (or faster then) TWO 2.8-3.0 ghz Xeon processors (with HT enabled).

 

And yes, this means all the new upcoming laptops beat the crap outta everyone's old workstations, including mine.

 

Another interesting thread on a similar discussion of "WTF?"

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=334734&page=1

 

It should be noted that this type of information is only valid right now. You've got ALOT of new technology coming out this year, including new sockets for both AMD and Intel, new graphics cards, possible laptop flash drives (no hd's!), insano. Intel's new processors are supposed to be 20% faster then AMD's fastest current offering, at least from grain of salt prelim benchies.