Opteron 6200 series vs 8350 (Serious Multithreading)

[yellowputty]

Hi OCUK,

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I work with large scale simulations that are fully parallelized. To keep costs low, I purchased a 8150 which allows me to have 8 threads.

How would it compare if I used an Opteron 6200? Specifically 6272 with 16 cores at 2.1Ghz? This way I can also upgrade to 32 'cores'. Bare in mind that my simulations would benefit hugely with 32 cores.

I am just unsure as to the crossover with clock speed.

Thank you.

 

[JonJ678]

Depends on your code. The stuff I'm used to tends to be memory bandwidth limited, not cpu limited - so more cores doesn't help much but faster memory does.

If you're sure your code will scale linearly (well, near enough) then it may be worthwhile. You could plot runtime against the number of threads and see if it's remotely linear - if it's still scaling nicely at 8 cores it's probably worth a go at 16 if the clock speed is similar.

If you're memory bandwidth bound like me, you may regret going with AMD. Quad channel ddr3 on x79 is pretty good right now.