[Pc_Support] Yet another technology not in longhorn: improved CLI

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 20:58 -0400, Damien McKenna wrote:
> Any benefits on "basic" Athlon64?

Uni-processor really doesn't flex the AMD NUMA/HyperTransport design.
Not even dual-core does, although dual-core via HyperTransport is better
than the 2nd Memory Controller Hub bridged inside of Intel's approach.

You have to really get to 2-way or, better yet, 4-way to see Solaris
start to plummel Linux's immature NUMA support and lack of partial-mesh
of I/O interconnects.  The thing about Opteron is that you have the
_ultimate_ in "processor affinity."  Not just process-memory, but more
importantly, I/O and memory-mapped I/O, as it is per-CPU as well.

I didn't really think about it until I read the Linux Magazine article
(not on-line) which really shows how well Solaris runs on the
architecture.  People said it was Sun's proprietary box -- not true at
all!  All standard, "glueless" AMD8000 series HyperTransport tunnels.

> Do they have nForce4 drivers for it?

No need, it's all PCI interconnects from the standpoint of the software.
Only peripheral support would be the consideration.

I think Solaris will _always_lag_ Linux when it comes to peripheral
drivers.  Using it as a workstation is not ideal, Linux will always
support far more hardware.

But on a server, hmmmm, I'm really wondering if I should go with Linux
in the future.  At least not until Linux matures on Opteron.

And PCI-Express (PCIe) doesn't really offer much over PCI-X on the
typical server, at least not yet.  So having a nForce Pro chipset versus
an AMD8000 series doesn't really matter.  But even then, using PCIe
cards connected to specific CPUs should still do far better on Solaris,
as long as there is a driver.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
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