On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:41 AM, Andrzej Zawadzki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello, > > We're planning new production server for PostgreSQL and I'm wondering > which processor (or even platform) will be better: Quad Xeon or Quad > Opteron (for example SUN now has a new offer Sun Fire X4440 x64). > > When I was buying my last database server, then SUN v40z was a really > very good choice (Intel's base server was slower). This v40z still works > pretty good but I need one more. > > AFAIK Intel made some changes in chipset but... is this better then AMD > HyperTransport and Direct Connect Architecture from database point of > view? How about L3 cache - is this important for performance? > Intel's chipset is still broken when using dual sockets and quad core processors. The problem manifests itself as excessive cache line bouncing. In my opinion the best bang/buck combo on the CPU side is the fastest dual-core Xeon CPUs you can find. You get excellent single-thread performance and you still have four processors, which was a fantasy for most people only 5 years ago. In addition you can put a ton of memory in the new Xeon machines. 64GB is completely practical. I still run several servers on Opterons but in my opinion they don't make sense right now unless you truly need the CPU parallelism. -jwb
