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To: rudedog who wrote (257466)	12/20/2008 4:16:26 PM
From: tecate78732	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Your information is way way out of date.

To: rudedog who wrote (257466)	12/20/2008 7:44:12 PM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: MSFT has Intel Nehalem servers being tested but "are still behind current AMD parts by a significant margin" according to this guy. An interesting data point, but it's anecdotal, and hard to believe. Re: He also said that HP is pushing AMD, not Intel, for database servers, apparently because the "performance per watt" is better, allowing higher densities. It depends on which systems are in the comparison. For Dunnington vs. Shanghai, AMD may have better performance per watt, but again I'd like to see the data, rather than an anecdotal data point, which according to the other guy who responded to your post - may be out of date. Re: I think that Nehalem will be a strong part but Intel is just at the first generation of a server chip that supports virtual workloads, nested page tables, and other architectural support for the apps that will be dominating purchasing in the next few years, while AMD is in their third generation of those technologies. Not true. Intel has supported virtualization for several generations (since Woodcrest at least), and actually had their implementation to market first, with AMD following by 6 months. AMD was first with "Nested Page Tables" with Barcelona, but I'm not sure how valuable this feature is, nor why you think Intel will necessarily be at a disadvantage, since Shanghai will only be the second generation to sport this feature, and nothing says that Nehalem's first implementation won't be superior to it.

To: rudedog who wrote (257466)	12/21/2008 7:56:59 AM
From: NicoV	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

I've mentioned here before that Windows Azure appears to be 100% Opteron right now: Message 25171905 Interestingly, on the PDC Microsoft also hinted that their existing internet services would migrate to using the Azure platform, so that they could reuse all the manageability features of Windows Azure. They gave an example of how Windows Live Meeting could be ported to Window Azure, eliminating all the custom manageability stuff they built in Live Meeting. That means that for Microsoft, the only performance metrics that matter are performance metrics for stuff running in a hypervisor based virtualisation environment. Also interesting is that Microsoft is not seeking the absolutely fastest processors, but the systems that give them the lowest TCO. For Windows Azure, this means that their choice at this moment is 1.5-1.7 Ghz quad core quad socket NUMA systems (presumably ultra low power Opterons). Quite the opposite of 3 GHz Nehalem systems. E.g. the 55 Watt 1.8 Ghz AMD Opteron 8346 HE only costs $523. So you can build a 16 core machine for only $2000 dollar in CPU cost. But you also get 4 sockets that allow for 32 DIMMs, so you put a lot of cheap DDR2 memory in. It's no use having a system with a high amount of CPU power if you can't put in a correspond amount of RAM. For the PDC Windows Azure prerelease, Microsoft is dedicating a CPU and 1.7 GB of RAM for each VM. So most likely they fit each system with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. A 2 socket Nehalem system may have the same CPU power of an quad socket Opteron system, but it will not be able to have the same amount of memory. Basically, Opterons are cheap memory controllers with sufficient CPU power attached to them.

To: rudedog who wrote (257466)	12/22/2008 9:52:46 AM
From: Not a Short	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

I'm seeing these parts available now on the Dell configuration for a T605 Quad Core AMD Opteron™ 2384,4x512K Cache,2.7GHz Quad Core AMD Opteron™ 2382,4x512K Cache,2.6GHz Quad Core AMD Opteron™ 2380,4x512K Cache,2.5GHz Quad Core AMD Opteron™ 2378,4x512K Cache,2.4GHz Quad Core AMD Opteron™ 2376,4x512K Cache,2.3GHz Are you talking about other model numbers that are a specific TDP or are these what you are referring to? newegg.com shows them all at 75W