AMD launches Dell's four-core Opteron boxes
Issues ode to joy
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
Dell's Opteron experience hasn't been all that fantastic. After resisting the Opteron push for so long, Dell embraced AMD's flashy chip just as Intel started to catch up on performance and performance per watt metrics with Xeon. Then, Dell watched as AMD shot itself in the chest with the four-core Barcelona roll out. Dell was left with a bunch of designs that needed the MIA four-core Opteron and surely plenty of questions about why it bothered with AMD at all.
But despite such displeasure, Dell has invested in AMD and remains committed to Opteron for the foreseeable future. So, it upgraded five server boxes with Barcelona – now that the chip is finally shipping without flaws.
Customers can find four-core Opterons in the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970 and 6950 servers and the M605 blade box. There's also the PowerEdge T605 tower unit. All of those are two-socket boxes except for the four-socket 6950.
We're still waiting on Dell's Veso virtualization appliance that was, er, meant to ship in November with a pair of four-core Opteron chips. The box packs in a ton of memory and an embedded hypervisor. Dell had wagged the kit in front of customers to show how ahead of the compeittion it was in the virtualization game. AMD messed up the program just a bit by shipping Barcelona about nine months late. Oh well.
Anyway, AMD was so thrilled about Dell's Barcelona server launch that the chip company issued its own release touting the new gear alongside Dell's own celebratory hardware missive. ®
COMMENTS
Ah, AMD
I remember the days when the AMD K6 whooped Intel and cost a mere fraction of the price. What happened to those heady days of speed and cost saving? :(
"Hmm, new teeth. Where were we? Oh that's right. Barcelona!"
opteron outperforms core and xeon sometimes
*** networking ***
in network performance tests, opterons have been shown to outperform core and xeon systems by a large margin.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.firewalls.pfsense.user/2738/match=opteron+xeon
*** power ***
although at peak, opterons use more power than intel's, at idle they are more efficient, and a single-core opteron *might* be better for your application.
** performance ***
it's also been found that a core2quad can sometimes be slower than a core2duo because of the contention on the front-side bus, so again, if your application is CPU bound with a single thread, you need to consider that an intel might not be ideal!
Mine's two days late now
I'm stillwaiting for my free quad core Barcelona box which should have arrived on Monday as compensation for enduring their Virtualisation workshop...
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
