Chips, Performance and Power
January 3rd, 2006
At work our servers consist of a couple of Xeons and mostly Pentium 4s. We aren’t particularly attached to any part of our configuration (Hardware or Software) and so we are constantly looking for ways to improve our setup. This post on the Dreamhost Blog about the differing power consumptions of the dual core AMD Opterons and Intel Xeons. While we don’t particularly worry about the power consumption, the extra performance per dollar from the Opteron is something that we will take into account in the future.
The major difference is that Dreamhost is serving up websites and we are doing more general purpose, fileserving, mail, web and database. The other thing I wonder about is the uptake of Sun’s Niagara. The biggest uptake of them appears to me to be the support within Linux. The crazy amount of multithreading on those chips means that the kernel will need to support it, I’m not entirely sure wether or not support is going in or not, but there seems to be speculation that the support is not there (1 & 2)