Dual boards are all flimsy and buggy

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by HEADRAT
Got any examples, I'd like to see a review where an Opteron beats and Xeon and encoding video for exampel ?

To be completely honest, I don't think there are any. There's a very good reason for that - A lot of the applications that use streaming multimedia find the architecture of the P4 and Xeon highly agreeable. Also most of the Opteron vs. P4/Xeon reviews to date are not done well (see my prveious post).

To be completely honest, I don't think the Opteron, as it stands, can beat the P4/Xeon platform for certain types of applications. However, that does not mean the Opteron is one big turkey - it is not. Video encoding is only a very small part of the workstation market and those who do video editing and encoding all day long should look at the P4/Xeon solutions instead. However, given the Opteron's strong raw FPU performance, there still lots of areas it can be king of the hill - scientific applications, DCC, CAD/CAM, etc.

[Stoo]

At the moment the opteron is hopelessly underclocked.
Mpeg sound/vid encoding and 3d rendering are all fsb, clock cycle and memory bandwidth intensive, so for the most part the opteron will struggle (THG tests), however, once the clock cycle and fsb are turned up to a more comparible level (AMDZone tests), the opteron can then start to compete.

On other things like Seti etc the opteron romps away with quite an impressive margin, escially seeing as the opteron is running at half the clock speed.

By the time of the new year/first couple of months next year I expect that the opteron/athlon64's will have levelled the field of play (if not leading it), especially with the improved chipsets etc coming along.

[spikegifted]

Off topic... I just find it very hard to agree with a lot of non-mainstream things that THG has to say. They usually manage to make the wrong call.

[Stoo]

Yeah, but seeing as I haven't got multiple Xeon/Opteron rigs etc to do the benchies myself, I guess I'll have to take their word for it

[prehensile]

yeah thg slagged off all amd fans as sentimental try hards a year ago. wtf?

[TiG]

Bindi,

I hate to say it but you are the one coming off looking a bit childish this time, but you and headrat are both right about different things. But he's certainly got some valid points, just going off at his tone, which personally i can't see doesn't help matters.

At present the opteron just isn't up to beating dual xeons at encoding stuff, the software has been designed for intel to win, and of course they are going to bound on about it, But saying that check some of these benchmarks out. I think it should give you all some thinking to be done.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000251

Opterons to me appear to be very scalable servers from the fact that several very large purchases of 2k+ opterons mainly in China.

Opterons are in there infancy and there is much more to come from them and i agree if you are not doing video encoding, which as far as i'm concerned isn't really a job for a dual processor machine, its much more likely to be done on a Single home processor machine than a Server.

DB2 is be ported to 64bit software for opteron, and now that we've got a 64 bit app that can do some proper programs, we could see opteron dominate in all areas, especially if we see someone write an encoding program to take advantage of opterons strengths.

Just my 2p worth and certainly no need for anyone to get annoyed by this.

Its a good discussion and i think people are learnign a lot from it

TiG

[Bindibadgi]

Well. That's enough from me then.

[HEADRAT]

Certainly if the Opteron can get beyond 2.4 GHz then things are gonna get a lot more exciting

I think we're goning to have to wait for some time for a 64 bit operating system (other than Linux) and even longer for applications to be written 64 bit operators.

But who cares about that, if we can get screaming 32 bit performace that looks possible from what I've seen from the Opteron scores then AMD will have themselves a winner.

I'd like to see more head to head benchmarks, obviously early adopters always pay through the nose and it appears Opteron is no excepetion. If AMD can ensure that they keep the price a the Opteron competitive with the Xeon then great.

BUT

If it appears at the moment you 242 Opterons retailing @ £405.32 and 246's not even released (well I can't find a UK supplier) unless AMD is gonna drop the price of the 242's and bring the 246 at the same level they could have some trouble..

I want the Opteron to do well, more competition means lower prices for all

HEADRAT

PS Bindibadgi, no hard feeling matey, if I came across abrupt it was not my intent I certainly didn't mean to ruffle your feathers.

[Stoo]

Opteron/Athlon64 compatible XP 64bit should be out in beta form in September to co-incide with the initial release of the Althlon 64, with the full retail edition coming out earlyish next year I believe..

[HEADRAT]

I wonder what the first 64 bit app will be ? probably MS Office 64

HEADRAT

[Stoo]

notepad.exe

[HEADRAT]

Originally posted by Stoo
notepad.exe

Now your talking

Where's me wallet, I *NEED* 64 bit

HEADRAT

[Butuz]

sol.exe and winmine.exe

Theyre sureley the only progams that need the 64 bit powwaaaaaaahhhhh?

Butuz

[spikegifted]

Well, you never know... Hearing the guys over at Epic games saying that they're developing in 64bit, I won't be surprise that sometime in the near future, one of their games will come with a special 64bit version.

[Swafe]

the first 64bit app?

unreal2003.exe f00lZ0r

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by HEADRAT
But who cares about that, if we can get screaming 32 bit performace that looks possible from what I've seen from the Opteron scores then AMD will have themselves a winner.

I'd like to see more head to head benchmarks, obviously early adopters always pay through the nose and it appears Opteron is no excepetion. If AMD can ensure that they keep the price a the Opteron competitive with the Xeon then great.

I see what you're saying, but the point is - lots of people care. screaming 32bit performance has limitations, the biggest being the memory address space, even with M$ Windows' ability to virtually allocate additional address space to fool applications that they've access to additional resources. This is just like utilizing Windows virtual memory/pagefile. The performance hit is huge.

While 32bit performance may be impressive until larger memory space is required, the problem with firms is that they want their hardware to scale with their software. So what's the point of investing in super-fast 32bit hardware now when they know that some day soon, they'd be staring at an upgrade path up the 64bit road. It doesn't make sense to invest the money twice in the space of relatively short time.

Don't forget, it is very easy for you and I to take a rig off-line and put in a piece of hardware, but when the rig in question is mission critical, you can't afford to take it offline at all. So the solution has to be right for now and right for the foreseeable future. When we're looking at the foreseeable future, it's all about 64bit processing.

Welcome to the world of Itanium 2 and Opteron.