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To: milo_morai who wrote (6258)	8/23/2000 11:00:00 AM
From: jcholewa	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: "Behind AnandTech - The Server Configs" Holy crap! I just make do with a K6-2-400 (fBSD, IDE, PC100, for anyone interested) for everything. I don't even think I could survive buying half of what his site has! _ BTW, to keep this on-topic, I once again stress that the lack of multiprocessor platforms is causing my workplace's NetWare server to move from a K6-2-250 to a dual-capable PIII-500, despite the fact that out of the three people making the actual decision here, two are complete AMDroids and the third is ambivalent but seems to think that AMD makes more reliable parts than Intel (I believe his reason was "because they have to"). It's patently possible that AMD will miss this company's next web server upgrade (that K6-2-400) and mail server upgrade (currently a K6-2-266 overclocked a bit to 300/100, don't tell anybody!). The sad thing is that our business isn't even limited to Intel-only vendors. All our vendors produce both Intel and AMD systems. The only thing holding us back was multiprocessing. I suspect that many other small business are acting similarly. Shame on AMD for both this and for the commercial stuff that I was ranting about earlier today. ;) -JC

To: milo_morai who wrote (6258)	8/23/2000 1:24:40 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

RE:<Anand's Athlon servers> Anand's article on his server farm starts out with the initial Sun to x86 Intel platform conversion using dual SMP Intel processors. My response as I read the Anand article was "Gotta get to SMP... Gotta get to SMP... Gotta get to SMP" until Anand got to this part: It was the Web Servers that were feeling the most pain, they were simply running out of CPU time to process the tasks that remained in their individual queues. Knowing the problem, a solution was pretty easy to find...add more Web Servers, but what kind and how many? Hmmm, he needed very fast CPU's. Then he said, Secondly, when migrating from a single processor to dual processors, you don't see a perfect scale in performance (at least under NT/2K). Instead, adding a second CPU often gives you another 20 - 40% performance increase, definitely not the performance increase you'd see if you were to cluster two single processor systems together. Now, remember what we mentioned earlier, that for Database Servers you want a decent speed CPU but a large L2 cache but for Web Servers you want something with a fast CPU and a fast L2 cache, but not necessarily a large one. Hmmm, SMP not really necessary for a web server. Anand came to the conclusion that a 900 MHz Athlon would be faster than a dual 550 MHz Xeon. The high speed Coppermines were out of the question because of Rambus. So Anand added 4 seperate 1 GHz Athlon single-CPU Athlon TBirds to his web server configuration. I hope Anand publishes some benchmarks in the future comparing his GHz Athlon servers to his remaining dual-550 Xeon server. The four Athy's would cost less than the singe dual 550, and I bet each one vastly outperforms the dual 550. The seven page article starts at anandtech.com Petz