From owner-freebsd-performance@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jul 18 12:19:30 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1BE1116A403 for ; Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:19:30 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tom.hurst@clara.net) Received: from spork.qfe3.net (spork.qfe3.net [212.13.207.101]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D3D8313C471 for ; Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:19:29 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from tom.hurst@clara.net) Received: from [81.104.144.87] (helo=voi.aagh.net) by spork.qfe3.net with esmtp (Exim 4.66 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1IB8FD-000Jik-0c; Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:03:03 +0100 Received: from freaky by voi.aagh.net with local (Exim 4.67 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1IB8FC-0003Ou-Oe; Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:03:02 +0100 Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:03:02 +0100 From: Thomas Hurst To: Jack Toering Message-ID: <20070718120302.GA11968@voi.aagh.net> Mail-Followup-To: Jack Toering , freebsd-performance@freebsd.org References: <029401c7c8af$e5d19c60$6480010a@DELL9400> <02b101c7c8bf$442c2140$6480010a@DELL9400> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <02b101c7c8bf$442c2140$6480010a@DELL9400> Organization: Not much. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.15 (2007-04-06) Sender: Thomas Hurst Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which SMP CPU for FreeBSD 6.2? X-BeenThere: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Performance/tuning List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:19:30 -0000 * Jack Toering (Jack.Toering@LeadingEdgeITA.com) wrote: > These are things I need to hear bacause it doesn't make sense for me to > watch these things until I'm in the market because the technology moves so > fast. > > Thank you very much for your response! You probably don't need to follow every move, but it might make sense to do some actual research if performance matters to you? You don't even say what your performance critical server is going to be doing ;) Core 2 generally performs well, but K8's are still pretty good with many workloads thanks to their far superior interconnects. Most numbers I've seen have been more based on games and media encoding in single socket configurations, and in 32bit mode at that; not exactly interesting use cases for most servers. Things get even less clear cut when you start worrying about power consumption. One of our more CPU heavy server uses actually depends very heavily on memory bandwidth, which Intel are still lagging behind on quite significantly, and of course things like lights out management and driver support are generally far more critical than a 10% performance difference in $random_microbenchmark. -- Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst http://hur.st/