Source: AMD's Opteron finds a new gear | InfoWorld | Review | 2005-04-21 | By Tom Yager.
Intel’s claim of technological parity with AMD is an easily penetrated smoke screen.
Until Intel delivers its dual-core Xeon, its competitive technology remains Hyper-Threading. Hyper-Threading is an ingenious stopgap that Intel developed to boost the performance of a narrow range of applications.... But even with applications that use many threads, Hyper-Threading delivers, even by Intel estimates, a maximum of about 30 percent improvement to an application’s performance. And these benefits are limited only to heavily threaded applications; Hyper-Threading does not speed up the entire system. In fact, with most systems running a mix of threads and processes, Hyper-Threading can harm performance; a scan of Intel’s SPEC benchmarks reveals that Xeon system vendors often disable Hyper-Threading to improve Xeon’s results.
In contrast to Xeon’s Hyper-Threading, dual-core Opteron is optimized to accelerate the performance of all applications on a system in a fairly uniform fashion. Dual core is an efficient alternative to the common practice of scale-up, which provides a total speed improvement by enabling the server to divide its workload across what amounts to several tightly connected computers. A dual-processor, dual-core Opteron system allows an operating system to distribute its total workload across the logical equivalent of four discrete physical CPUs.
Opteron is as close to future-proof as any entry-level 64-bit server or workstation architecture can be. Systems purchased today should still be operating five to seven years from now, with only incremental upgrades through CPU swaps and higher-density RAM (1GB per module instead of today’s 512MB). The dual-core Opteron systems hitting the market this week won’t merely be the best investment in the PC server and workstation spaces. They’re the best bet if you want systems that you won’t have to replace for a long long time.
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