Thoughts
The release today of AMD's dual-core workstation and server parts is a significant landmark in the world of x86 computing for the enterprise and professional users. The ability to pack twice the processing power into the same space opens up new doors for clustering, research, data processing, data mining, webserving, content creation, digital media production, video editing, games development and much more. While the cost is high for the time being, economies of scale and a pervasive range of processors to choose from will only bring the price down, and significantly so.The performance is obviously there if your major applications are multi-threaded and are architected to take advantage of more than one processor. That was never in doubt, really. For the professional user, using any of the major applications that I've benchmarked for this article, a multi-processor machine is a default choice. That you can get almost all of the power of a dual Opteron system in a single socket is key, and for the existing dual-socket user there's the possibility to further increase performance by a large margin just by dropping in some new processors.
Supporting Cool'n'Quiet, the new Opterons also have the potential to run cooler and consume less power than existing single-core models when idle, something the corporates will no doubt jump all over.
While application development now has a minor hill to climb to support more than a pair of compute threads, for dual-core systems with more than two sockets, there's no doubting it'll get there, with the two major x86 CPU vendors going in the dual-core direction.
Multi-threading on the desktop is much more than performance increases in applications, too. It's about the smoothness of operation you can get when you've got more than one CPU, and that's something I'll investigate in due course.
For now, for the workstation guys and the people building Opteron servers, twice the computing power in the same space and with the potential to cost you less to run over time is compelling.
I'll investigate SMP Xeon performance as soon as a board arrives and Intel have dual-core Xeon to come, too. What we now wait for is AMD dual-core on the desktop, with the X2 range, to see if they can carry on their dominance of enthusiast computing with those parts.
Armari's Gravistar XR
Just as I was finishing this article up, Armari sent over the final pricing for the workstation I used to test dual-core Opteron. Called the Gravistar XR, when outfitted with a Quadro FX 3400 and a pair of Opteron 275s, along with the 4GiB or memory, 500GB of Seagate 7200.8 hard disks, the same mainboard, chassis, 7-in-1 card reader, 645W PSU, Windows XP 64-bit installed, with a Logitech keyboard and mouse and Sony DRU-720A dual layer burner, it'll cost you £3999.00 without VAT.During testing it behaved impeccably, with only slight instability with the BIOS revision the Tyan board had with a single CPU installed, rather than two. Armari equipped it with a pair of Akasa AK-856 coolers which were quiet and unobtrusive. Indeed, the entire system made less noise than my personal FX-55 system and my girlfriend's Prescott 3.2GHz small-form-factor PC, both of which run in my office. So not only powerful, but pretty quiet too.
For just the right side of £4700, without a monitor, it's pretty pricy, but given the power of a four-core 2.2GHz (nearly 9GHz of compute power in a regular sized chassis) system with 4GiB of memory, running Windows XP 64-bit edition, along with Armari's build quality and support, it seems decent value.
Again, our thanks to Armari for the loan system, which will ship in May as soon as they have good stock of Opteron 275s. While it'd be tempting to say nice things about them just for the loan of the system, their reputation in the UK is well deserved and they big themselves up without my fumbled writing at the end of an article.
Yum yum. Now where did I put that spare five grand...
