Re: Differences between AMD and Intel CPUs [was: Re: Dragonfly andHyperthreading....]

["Thomas Edward Spanjaard" <t.e.spanjaard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<EM1897@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:02FB1A9B.3D7CFFE9.000424FF@xxxxxxxxxx
> I'd much rather hear why you don't think that the bus
> speed of the network adapter is a worthy criteria for
> hardware selection than your opinion on my conduct.
> Your reasoning is what gives you credibility; not your
> name. It seems implausible that you don't understand
> what a bottleneck a standard PCI bus is.

Just as a sidenote, I've been able to get 12.3MiBps each out of two standard 
3c905ctx-m over a single PCI bus, with concurrent disk access (the 
controller where network data was flowing to was also on the same bus, old 
peecee). It just pays to investigate the options the hardware has for you, 
and busmastering PCI with DMA certainly ups the average attained speed on 
the 'slow' PCI bus. Of course, for Gigabit you are limited even by the 
theoretical maximum transfer rate, but there's PCI-X out there, as you 
mentioned, to alleviate that. When it comes to PCI-X, *all* boards are 
relatively expensive, not just the AMD-powered ones. For instance, take a 
look at the Tyan catalogue, it gives you a fairly good impression of server 
mainboard price differences accross the three (four including the Athlon MP) 
x86 server platforms.

Knowing that, it sounds ridiculous to claim that you can get a 3.2GHz P4 
with a motherboard with PCI-X for under 300$. Unless it's a special deal 
ofcourse, but special deals are not to be relied on when making proper cost 
estimates.

On the point of MP performance, everyone knows that only multithreaded 
applications can really take advantage of it, and network stacks aren't 
usually MP compatible. Knowing that high traffic means lots of interrupts, 
it's also easy to see why an MP machine with non-MP-compatible network stack 
performs worse than a UP machine.

Of course, to the 'dumb' manager who needs to get a set amount of 
performance, this all doesn't matter as long as he gets it for a reasonable 
price. Maybe it's here where we're shifting: the bulk of the list users tend 
to go for the best solution, whereas said manager goes for the solution that 
solves his problems the quickest at the lowest cost.

Now as a personal note to 'EM1897', please fix your client to properly 
support message threads :).

Cheers,
       -- Thomas E. Spanjaard