Speaking of the recent hardware order... No one seems to have addressed the issue of ordering Intel based machines over AMD based machines brought up here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hardware_ordered_March_2005
We're getting more bang for our buck when we purchase AMD machines, which is why I assume most of the machines on the purchase list are AMD's. It's not clear what type of P4's (as listed on the order page) are being purposed, however if they are comparable in price to any Opteron, I'd highly suggest going with an Opteron. All of the software we run should run just as easily on an AMD chipset because they support the x86 instruction set. An Opteron has the added advantage of having an on-die memory controller with high bandwidth connections to the memory. This could certain help with the Apaches on retrieval time, it certainly wouldn't hurt. If we are talking about something of lower price than Opterons, it's still true that and AMD will be compatible with our software and provide more bang for the buck. Those who have donated the money for the new hardware expect us to spend it responsibly and to put it to it's best use. We should not waste money when there are clear alternatives.
On 4/18/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
hi
I heard there was an hardware order recently. If so, could someone update this page accordingly ? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_ordered_March_2005 thanks
ant
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mbecker ™ wrote:
Speaking of the recent hardware order... No one seems to have addressed the issue of ordering Intel based machines over AMD based machines brought up here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hardware_ordered_March_2005
We're getting more bang for our buck when we purchase AMD machines,
Can you provide actual benchmark results and a price/performance comparison?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
First I need to know what I'm comparing to. What P4 CPU would we be buying? Of course I can provide you with lots of benchmarks for AMD chips vs. Intel chips that show the better price/performance. However these would be meaningless without some comparison to the hardware we care about.
On 4/18/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
mbecker ™ wrote:
Speaking of the recent hardware order... No one seems to have addressed the issue of ordering Intel based machines over AMD based machines brought up here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hardware_ordered_March_2005
We're getting more bang for our buck when we purchase AMD machines,
Can you provide actual benchmark results and a price/performance comparison?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Just a simple example of P4 vs. Athlon XP. I chose older chips simply because they are cheap and the benchmarks were easy to find. If I knew which P4 was being considered, I could provide more relevant benchmarks. Also, keep in mind that the prices of these chips have decreased significantly since this article was written (2002). http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000289 "Knowing that a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 costs $562 and that an Athlon XP 2000+ (on average slightly faster) comes with a $339 pricetag, it is crystal clear that the Athlon is still the king in the price/performance department." Here's an article with some possibly more useful benchmarks: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=914&page=4 The cheapest you can currently get this P4 (based on search of pricegrabber.com) is $110 US. The cheapest you can get the Athlon is $60 US. Therefore, you get the following price/performance ratios based on the last review: CPU Bench Athlon: 77.25 MIPS/$ P4: 35.48 MIPS/$ (Dhrystone) Athlon: 38.68 MFLOPS/$ P4: 9.59/22.5 MFLOPS/$ (Whetstone) Multimedia Bench Athlon: 151.68 it/s/$ P4: 72.57 it/s/$ (Int) Athlon: 177.88 it/s/$ P4: 89.02 it/s/$ (Float) Memory Bench Athlon: 33.57 MB/s/$ P4: 9.57 MB/s/$ (Int) Athlon: 31.72 MB/s/$ P4:9.56 MB/s/$ (float)
That's an average of 2.85 performance/price increase of this AMD chip over the P4!! Now obviously if we get more expensive processors we might have lower or higher benchmarks/$ depending on how far up the line we go. I would be more than willing to look into which processor would provide us the best performance/price if people are interested.
Can you provide actual benchmark results and a price/performance comparison?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
mbecker ™ wrote:
Just a simple example of P4 vs. Athlon XP. I chose older chips simply because they are cheap and the benchmarks were easy to find. If I knew which P4 was being considered, I could provide more relevant benchmarks.
Unfortunately I can't give you a particular test system example because I don't know exactly what's on the table (though that ought to get mentioned eventually, if someone actually has been working on an order).
[snip generic benchmarks]
I'd be more interested in seeing some MediaWiki rendering and Lucene search benchmarks, which could represent our actual workload. Price/performance shouldn't be calculated for the CPU alone, either; we're buying whole machines, not bare CPUs.
Not all benchmarks favor the same candidate, and it looks like differences are at most going to be a couple percentage points when comparing whole system price.
Note that my own personal prejudice runs in favor of AMD; I buy Athlons for my home PCs and hiss and boo Intel at every opportunity. But if we're going to make purchasing decisions explicitly based on a price/performance claim I think we need something more than warm fuzzy feelings of fighting The Man.
We started out getting Opteron boxes for the databases specifically in order to have something that would deal well with a big chunk of memory, whereas the commodity P4-based 1U servers were the generic case, considered to be reliable and reasonably cost-effective based on (anecdotal) experience.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 11:02:20PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Note that my own personal prejudice runs in favor of AMD; I buy Athlons for my home PCs and hiss and boo Intel at every opportunity. But if we're going to make purchasing decisions explicitly based on a price/performance claim I think we need something more than warm fuzzy feelings of fighting The Man.
Plus, y'know, Intel may be The Man in this comparison, but AMD is The Other Man.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
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