On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Bill Broadley <[email protected]> wrote: >> I would say that the 2x6-cores Magny-Cours probably has to be compared >> to Nehalem-EX. > > Why?
Maybe first because that's where the core spaces from AMD and Intel intersect (8-cores Beckton and 8-cores Magny-Cours). I'm not sure it's really significant to compare performance between a 6-cores Westmere and a 12-cores Magny-Cours. I feel it makes more sense to compare apples to apples, ie. same core count. And then, also maybe because they are the same MP class, not dual-socket only. Meaning there are similarly equipped in terms of memory channels and inter-CPU links (QPI or HT), to be associated in platforms of 4 or more. > Various vendors try various strategies to differentiate products based > on features. For the most part HPC types care about performance per $, > performance per watt, and reliability. I'd be pretty surprised to see large > HPC cluster built out of Nehalem-EX chips. Not entirely built out of Nehalem-EX, probably, but including a fair share of this newly coming (again) SMP machines, I have no doubt. Users, both academic and from the industry, have more and more needs for huge amounts of memory, that can not easily be met using the distributed memory approach. Nehalem-EX and Magny-Cours offers just that, hundreds of GB or RAM. I know some people drooling right now at the idea of putting their hands on a 1TB machine. I'm totally in line with you on the price/perf points you made, though. Cheers, -- Kilian _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
