AMD 64, my god.

[Dante]

Check out the AMD 64 below... wow.


http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9331,00.html

[SoerenM]

I'm currently looking into a dual opteron (amd64 too) workstation. :-)
Unfortunately the opterons are a bit pricey currently so I'm still not sure if I'd go with a dual xeon instead...
Looking at the major benchmarking sites the opteron/xeon are about on par performance wise with current 32bit software (comparing CPUs with the same price of course - however the AMDs at about 1ghz less speed ;o)

-Sören

(if I wanna be patriotic I would have to go with an AMD processor cause most of them are produced here in crappy old germany ;o)

[vovka]

With AMD 64 you will have couple problems:
Not many OS supporting 64 bit, Microsoft just released XP beta for AMD 64, you can download for free from there site.
Aplications not yet developt for 64 bit.
Also motherboard bugy and have some issue with CPU.
I will recomend wait for list 3-5 month (wait till windows XP for AMD64 released) before spending money.
From testing on regular XP platforn , almost no speed defference, and some applications was running slower.
Same problem was with 32 bit proccessors, till OS and applications was rewriten for them.

[SoerenM]

In regard to Windows this is right but than there are already AMD64 compatible Linux distributions out there that can already take full advantage of these processors.
Furthermore AMD64 is supposed to be 100% compatible with current 32 bit OS' and applications!
And the benchmarks I saw/read until now don't show that AMD64 (I'm talking about opteron here not the slightly "crippled" Athlon 64 ;o) is slower in any regard than their "legacy" Athlon counterparts.
However the only thing I'm worried about is what you already have mentioned - problems/"bugs" with the fairly new motherboards... *sigh*
Then on the other hand everything dual opteron should be considered workstation.. so at least the boards they built into the "real" workstation systems should be stable somehow. ;-)

[vovka]

My experance based on our testing lab ( we build linux cluster supercomputers). I had lots time to play and :( burn lots of cpu's. We can go to technical issues with 64 bit address but don't utilize properly with 32 bit program access and spending additional CPU cycles ... blah blah blah , but this is boring :)
Linux is nice, free except most app i like to run is windows OS.
I like AMD processors, but Xenon still little bit faster for video production.

[SoerenM]

Ah finally someone with good real life experiences (it seems). So you're really working in such a "lab"? Well I just take you for honest so this seems to be a viable source of information...
well then I'm going to tend again to the dual Xeon setup.. *sigh* (I'm lost ;o)

[vovka]

here my work place:
http://www.linuxnetworx.com/

[SoerenM]

Thanks Steve!
Well I'm currently in the decission making process and I'm still not sure which route to go.
One day I'm routing for Opteron next day for Xeon again because I'm hearing as many pro/cons for Opteron as for Xeon *sigh* (from real experts as well as from self proclaimed experts ;o).
As I'm only using dual proc workstations since the PII 400 I'm looking for a dual proc config again...
2 days ago I ("virtually") assembled aprox. the same config one time employing 2x Opteron 244 and once with 2x Xeon 3,06GHz (both CPUs are currently available here in germany at about the same price and according to many benchmarks deliver about the same performance with 32bit software). Of course the Opteron offers 64bit support and switching to slower speeds - two very nice features that Xeon simply hasn't. But well.. in the end the dual Opteron system was about 800 EUR more expensive than the dual Xeon config. :-(

Unfortunately the only "real" dual Opteron turnkey workstation available here is from Fujitsu-Siemens... I don't know of any other. And it's quite expensive! I didn't yet find out if Boxxtech systems are available here without being much more expensive than purchasing them in the US ;)

Cheers,
-Sören