[Pc_Support] Re: Dissecting PC Server Performance

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 14:03 +0100, Patrick wrote:
> Bryan,
> Thanks for the very informative article about PC server performance. I
> was wondering if you know of a list with dual Opteron and Athlon64 based
> server products that comply with AMD's reference design in using all the
> bells and whistles so should have the best performance the platform has
> to offer. Afaik the reference design is usually implemented by an OEM.
> Any idea who made AMD's reference design and if it's for sale?

The 4-way HP DL585 follows AMD's reference design with (2) AMD8131 dual-
PCI-X 1.0 HyperTransport tunnels.  Most of the other 4-way designs I've
seen only come with 1.

The new 2-way Tyan S2895 uses the new CK8"Pro" chipset, nVidia
Professional 2200 PCIe x20, plus the AMD8131 dual-PCI-X 1.0, on CPU0. It
also then uses the nVidia Professional 2050 PCIe x20 on CPU1, which
gives you a true PCIe x16 connected to each CPU.  It's similar to figure
7 in my article, except the AMD8131 is on CPU0, and there is a 2nd
nVidia chip on CPU1.  It runs about $500 but gives you 3x the I/O of the
nForce4, plus 8x the PCI I/O thanx to the AMD8131.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                  b.j.smith at ieee.org 
---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Community software is all about choice, choice of technology.
Unfortunately, too many Linux advocates port over the so-called
"choice" from the commercial software world, brand name marketing.
The result is false assumptions, failure to focus on the real
technical similarities, but loyalty to blind vendor alignments.