Re: hardware advice

On 9/27/2012 2:47 PM, Shaun Thomas wrote:
> On 09/27/2012 02:40 PM, David Boreham wrote:
>
>> I think the newer CPU is the clear winner with a specintrate
>> performance of 589 vs 432.
>
> The comparisons you linked to had 24 absolute threads pitted against
> 32, since the newer CPUs have a higher maximum cores per CPU. That
> said, you're right that it has a fairly large cache. And from my
> experience, Intel CPU generations have been scaling incredibly well
> lately. (Opteron, we hardly knew ye!)
Yes, the "rate" spec test uses all the available cores. I'm assuming a
concurrent workload, but since the single-thread performance isn't that
much different between the two I think the higher number of cores,
larger cache, newer design CPU is the best choice.
>
> We went from Dunnington to Nehalem, and it was stunning how much
> better the X5675 was compared to the E7450. Sandy Bridge isn't quite
> that much of a jump though, so if you don't need that kind of
> bleeding-edge, you might be able to save some cash. This is especially
> true since the E5-2600 series has the same TDP profile and both use
> 32nm lithography.
We use Opteron on a price/performance basis. Intel always seems to come
up with some way to make their low-cost processors useless (such as
limiting the amount of memory they can address).