Greg Hess Posted July 9, 2003 Share Posted July 9, 2003 Trying to start a flame war gare? Maybe opteron "competition" would be a better title . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 11, 2003 Author Share Posted July 11, 2003 This doesn't do much to help matters either. I swear i am not picking anyones side in this at all, and respect all platforms for their strengths and weaknesses for workstations, desktops, laptops, servers etc. Bad news. http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105023161 Current i865 and i875 motherboards will not support Prescott this makes the upgrade path of current i865/i875 boards as bad as with AMD boards. I was planning on buying a 2.4GHz P4C + I865 and overclock it and then upgrade to a low-end Prescott next year. Now I will most likely do a super cheap nForce 2 + AXP 1700+ upgrade and do a complete CPU+Mainboard+RAM upgrade next year. http://www.anandtech.com/#20014 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted July 11, 2003 Share Posted July 11, 2003 Gare, Your surprised? Thats intel's basic method of dealing with cpu speed increases. They've done it since the pentium, they'll continue to do it. They'll be doing it to the xeon's come Q1 2004. I have to say though that I GREATLY disagree with this statement. this makes the upgrade path of current i865/i875 boards as bad as with AMD boards. From the original KT133A to the AMD760MPX AMD's upgrade route has been utterly rediculous. From the original socket A KT133's, you could upgrade from a poor 750 megahertz, all the way to a 2200+ XP. Thats a huge upgrade route...spanning well over a year of time. The AMD760MPX boards take everything from the 1.2 MP's to the 2800+ MP's...almost regardless of revision. Another massive upgrade route. Now the poster should rephrase his argument to include.... this makes the upgrade path of current i865/i875 boards as bad as with AMD boards. To This makes the upgrade path of current i865/i875 as bad as with the upcoming chip changes by AMD. With both opteron/athlon64 bridging into the market, current socket A systems will soon become obsolete and unupgradable. And with that statement...you can be assured that when Nforce3 becomes widely available, I will probably drop single XP recommendations from my list... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 12, 2003 Author Share Posted July 12, 2003 Nice Opteron review here at tbreak (pics anyhow): http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=223 According to this poster, who spoke in Intel's defense in the Prescott thing: Intel made it very clear to Motherboard manufacturers what it would take to support Prescott. They decided not to do their homework, and now are spreading FUD that Intel's changing their platform at the last second. http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105023299 Just another query btw: Has anyone here any experience with WD Raptor 10K IDE drives? Apparently they are tested and guaranteed for server types of workloads. Don't know how they go on price/GB though, or how good they actually are. I would like to know alot more about them before committing to early 10k IDE versions, which make those kinds of claims. [ July 12, 2003, 09:08 AM: Message edited by: garethace ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wiggy Posted July 12, 2003 Share Posted July 12, 2003 Originally posted by garethace: Has anyone here any experience with WD Raptor 10K IDE drives? Apparently they are tested and guaranteed for server types of workloads. Don't know how they go on price/GB though, or how good they actually are. I would like to know alot more about them before committing to early 10k IDE versions, which make those kinds of claims. Review on the drives- http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200303/20030320WD360GD_1.html I think the prices for them are around 3x the price of other (7200) IDE drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 13, 2003 Author Share Posted July 13, 2003 WOW! 3 times is alot in fairness. I would be into the lower bracket of SCSI in performance/capacity at 3 times the price. Still, what i mean is, that raptor type of product from WD could take off, and become more mainstream. I think one of the main components in any workstation that can be a bit dodgy nowadays is the hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wiggy Posted July 13, 2003 Share Posted July 13, 2003 Well strike that- I'm looking at prices right now, and they're 2x as much (WD 40GB 7200RPM @ $69 vs 36GB Raptor @ $139). The feature I like most is the 5 year warranty- that's very welcome in a world of 1 yr warranties on the most important piece (well, what's on it) of a computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 16, 2003 Author Share Posted July 16, 2003 Heres a question for Greg: I came across a debate waging over at aces, about the difference between single channel memory (DDR-400) and dual channel memory for workstation use. This is to do with AMDs release of the AMD 64 754-pin platform late this year or in early 2004 some tiime. With AMD trying to release 400mhz fsb chips now, shortage of motherboards for the Opteron etc, and problems with Newisys, apparently AMD are working hard to push out the AMD 64 platform for highend pcs and low end workstations, in 754-pin format and a 939-pin large cache dual channel AMD 64 for highend workstations. AFAIK, dual channel doesn't even get that much more performance for the P4, which generally requires much more bandwidth than Athlon. In some of Anand's benchmarks with an 800MHz fsb comparing single and dual channel, dual channel only got an improvement of less than 5% for most games. The only reason AMD needs a dual channel capable chip for the PC market, is to keep enthusiast from buying Opterons. It is all marketing, IMO. The market demands dual channel, even though the performance probably isn't worth the cost, so AMD will sell them dual channel. The post is here: http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105024117 I was just wondering Greg if you would care to make any comments about the performance of dual channel Xeon DP chipsets over any of the highend pc single channel intel p4 chipsets? I would be greatful for your assistance here Greg, as i appears now that AMD 64 and Opteron are going in very opposite directions - aimed at different functions completely. Apparently the Opteron processors running 32-bit software and OSes, are quite sucessful under demanding server/internet loads compared to either the AMD MP solution, or Intel Xeon solutions. While at low demand loading on the server, the difference between Xeon, AMD MP and Opteron seems to be very neglegible. I.e. Most server benchmarks are not really representative of what Opteron can do under heavy loading conditions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted July 16, 2003 Share Posted July 16, 2003 Hey Gare, I'll try to answer based on my experiences . First off...the original aceshardware poster is correct. Current Athlon cpu's don't NEED dual channel. The performance difference between single and dual channel DDR in a single cpu platform aren't very large. But you also have to remember that the best Socket A motherboards on the market currently (for stability/performance) happen to be the nforce2 boards...which although are dual channel DDR boards...you don't HAVE to use both channels. (You can run them with one dimm). So the discussion between whether dual/single channel on Socket A's is kinda of mute...since the best boards have it regardless of whether or not its actually useful I was just wondering Greg if you would care to make any comments about the performance of dual channel Xeon DP chipsets over any of the highend pc single channel intel p4 chipsets? Basically the largest advantage the new E7505 chipsets give is in cost. Instead of paying out the wazzo for high cost PC800 ECC Registered Rambus...now users can purchase realitively inexpensive PC2100 DDR...even unbuffered DDR on some of the E7505 variants. Thats a HUGE cost difference...and as most tests indicate...though the E7505 board's might not always be faster...their definitely not any slower then their older rambus counterparts. E7505 has basically allowed further penetration of Xeon's into less high end markets. Systems that used to cost 4-5k, now cost 3-4k. (Or if you build it yourself, 1.5-2k) As for opteron/athlon64 discussions... These chips already have a hella lot of bandwidth. Take a look at the G5 for example. Freaking ungodly amount of bandwidth. Do the processors really need this much bandwidth? No. They actually (at least according to intel's itanium work) require less bandwidth then an equivilant 32 bit processor. Itanium I for example, actually used SDRAM in dual cpu configurations. Heck, they only moved to DDR in quad configs. So why would AMD be pushing DC-DDR in Opteron/athlon64? Marketing? Perhaps. Expandability? Perhaps. Performance? We won't really know that till we see a board which can run in both single/dual channel configurations. I for one would rather see too much bandwidth..then not enough. Take a look at the P4 celerons with SDRAM for example. SLOW AS $!#T. Hope that helps answer your questions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 16, 2003 Author Share Posted July 16, 2003 Thanks a million Greg, that was a very good answer i think. A couple of posts later on, these server administration guys are actually mentioning exactly the same issues you zoned in on: bandwidth. Here is the post i mean: http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105024412 I took an inventory of all my systems last week, and to my astonishment, the system with the LESS memory and the most expensive costing in the memory in the system was the rambus system. (384MB of Rambus PC800 ECC, not even sufficient for any serious workstation uses, but it does what i want it to do, excel spreadsheets and a bit of 2-d cadwork) With the money i had spent getting the memory for the RAMBUS system a while back, i have since spent again to put, wait for it, 1GB each of Kingston value SDRAM in two low end 2d cad workstations!!!!! BTW, i think the only reason that rambus system, is there at all, is because at the time i was so fed up of using the 815 chipset from Intel with its miserable performance and 512MB limitation. I think, my concept must have been to put 1GB of rambus memory into the expensive workstation board when the price eventually came down! Thats not going to happen now though. [ July 16, 2003, 04:23 PM: Message edited by: garethace ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 18, 2003 Author Share Posted July 18, 2003 The new Xeon DP: dangerous competitor to the Xeon MP? http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105024821 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 23, 2003 Author Share Posted July 23, 2003 Xeon DP/AMD XP/Opteron compared: http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=xeon3061MB&page=1&cookie%5Ftest=1 Or on the other end of things: Samsung's 533 MHz ARM http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105025634 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 The Operton is a 64bit CPU? It is being sold running XP or W2K. When do we expect a 64bit OS from Microsoft? There must be a flavor of Linux that is 64bit, but that won't help with the majority of stuff I use, and the Mac OS is 64bit now, I think. I'm just wondering what the advantage of Operton really is. The benchmarks posted above show it to not really outperform my current Athlon MP2600. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 23, 2003 Author Share Posted July 23, 2003 The Opteron is a server cpu, but there is a desktop product (only capable of being used in 2-way cpu boxes, while the opteron is 8-way or 16-way shortly) called the AMD 64, coming out in September roughly that should be aimed at the higher end desktop and workstation market. So having a review of the Opteron for workstation/dekstop use is a bit pointless. Anyhow, Suse LInux (the european german equivalent of Red Hat) is currently the only available Linux 'Opteron compatible' 64 bit cpu. Red Hat workstation and server 64 bit edition is already available for Intel's Itanium 2 though. The big advantage of buying Opteron over Itanium 2, is being able to run 32-bit applications on 32-bit Linux and changing over then when 64 bit red hat and 64-bit 3d apps become available. The main thing holding this back now, is the slow speeds of the Opteron chips. Basically the advantages of Opteron over a 32-bit Windows platform form and cpu are: capability to address up to 16, 32GB etc, of memory. We are currently ham strung at the moment at around 2-3GB of memory by all Windows OSes. Yeah, MS will come out with Longhorn 64 bit windows, but don't hold your breath on that one. The other major advantage Opteron has over say Xeon DP (up to two) or Xeon MP (up to eight cpus) is that most of the motherboard chips are built onto the Opteron cpu die itself. Making manufacture of 8-ways Opteron systems cheaply, and easily (one hopes) a piece of cake, compared to the complexity of 8-way Intel Xeon products. Then each Opteron is also free to address 4GB of memory, in current Opteron server products. This only really applies to large database servers, but nonetheless the Opteron could be a very interesting prospect for rendering boxes too, when the technnology develops - as the Opteron runs quite cool also - being accomodated quite easily into small form factor chassis, which are rack-mountable and all of that. Itanium 2 may eventually be very interesting too though - noone now really knows which platform will be 'the one' for highend workstations of the future. Hp seem to have backed the Itanium, and we all know that Hp are good designers for workstation systems, for a long, long time now. AMD Opteron is having problems getting any big oem to take it on board at the moment. The main one, being Samina-Newisys, which is just a start-up, which might get eventually bought up by IBM, sun, dell, or someone like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 AMD Opteron is having problems getting any big oem to take it on board at the moment.Thank you for all that. I was wondering because we have had the open-mouthed BOXX banner ad yelling "Operton" atop the forum for a few weeks. I doubt I need a new machine in the next few months, but I might need one in September, if I get a project I am bidding on. That may just be a bit too early for worrying about anything 64bit. A high-clock dual CPU might be better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris_A Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 The G5 is a 64-bit chip and is constructed to support 32 and 64-bit apps natively. G5's are slated for delivery in August (running 10.2.7 a 64-bit enabled version of the current OS), and 'Panther' (10.3) in September and thus not currently available. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted July 24, 2003 Author Share Posted July 24, 2003 Interesting stuff Chris! Apparently someone on another forum pointed out the difference between the terms 'advertising' like the AMD banners you see all over the place now, and the term 'marketing', which does refer more to getting products supported by large oems, arranging good distribution channels, agreements with oems to supply sufficient quantities and stick to product release roadmaps. Even the Opteron is only a young platform yet and hopefully will do well, AMD will still have to learn some lessons from Intel and the likes, in how to guarantee good product releases in named boxes such as Hp, IBM, dell etc - in many different product markets - low end, middle and high end. To date, AMD is still learning about how to market properly, and to arrange its products and technology to conform to a good marketing strategy. Their technology is sometimes alot better than Intels IMHO, but the marketing takes more than just advertising on banners etc, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted August 19, 2003 Author Share Posted August 19, 2003 Apple G5 news: http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105031467 http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105031264 Prescott heat: http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105031173 http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105031174 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted September 11, 2003 Author Share Posted September 11, 2003 yet more Prescott heat. http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105036266 compared to PPC 970 heat dissipation: http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105035964 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted September 17, 2003 Author Share Posted September 17, 2003 P4 + PCI Express Graphics card about 200 watts? http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105038095 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted September 23, 2003 Author Share Posted September 23, 2003 a look into the bright future of computing? http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030929/tech/29chips.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted September 26, 2003 Author Share Posted September 26, 2003 Some opinions here about the new Prescott chip, will probably debut next year, and Intel are pushing hard with DDR II spec. Watch this space. http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105041040 But also check out the overclocked Athlon 64 FX to 2.8GHZ here: http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000272 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garethace Posted June 7, 2004 Author Share Posted June 7, 2004 ..... ahh.... a lot of water under the bridge..... Any opinions on these new series of chipsets Greg? http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=115083392 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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