Putting it all in RAM (was: comparing CPU's)

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Mon Aug 28 15:27:07 UTC 2006


On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 11:06:28AM -0400, Dave Cramer wrote:
> Ted's example is more desktop based. Which I agree CPU is not a big  
> deal, I'm really more interested in the bleeding edge of server CPU  
> technology.
> 
> My concerns are addressed mostly by Chris' reply, but am curious  
> about power consumption, and heat dissipation as well. Opterons are  
> well known for their alternate use as small heaters, but this is  
> somewhat the price to be paid for speed.

Compared to the xeon's the opterons are very cool running.  The latest
xeon's on the other hand are fairly even with the opterons on power
consumption, although it depends which opteron model you look at since
they ahve low power versions, as well as a few that are higher power use
at the top end of speed.

> My suspicion is that as the Intel CPU's catch up in the speed arena,  
> they will also consume proportionally more power. Chris' reply  
> pointed out an oft ignored bit about memory bandwidth. Servers are  
> primarily all about moving bits to and from a disk, so raw CPU isn't  
> as important.

Intel's latest chip runs significantly faster than their previous chip,
and uses about half the power.  I do not expect power consumption to go
up any more.  people aren't willing to feed their computer from a
dedicated 15A outlet after all, with a seperate outlet for peripherals.
Even intel has now figured that out, and ATI and nVidia are also
seemingly figuring out that people don't want video cards that need
their own power brick and sound like a vacuum cleaner.

--
Len Sorensen
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