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Xeon or Barcelona Opteron

Chimerical

Chimerical

Chimerical

Soldato
Joined
21 Jul 2007
Posts
5,488
Right, basically I have the option of buying a £300 dual socket server (Socket F or LGA771) board and either two dual core 5130 Xeons or two AMD "Barcelona" 1.8GHz Quad Core CPU's. Does anyone know the performance of the Opterons, as it seems like I can get an eight-core system AMD for the same price as the Intel version.

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks.
 
Depends on what you intend to do with the server, from what I've heard the barcelona cpus have are superior at floating point calculations while the xeons are better at integer calculations.
 
I'm a student and I'm going to use it for video editing (with multithreaded programs obviously) so I'm guessing the Xeon's are better with their high FSB's and larger amounts of cache.

Although I don't actually know anything at all for definite, which is why I'm asking of course. This whole area of computing is new to me.
 
It seems like their isn't a great deal between them, the larger L2 cache of the xeons makes little difference as its a different architecture (2x2mb L2 cache vs 4x512 L2 and 2mb L3). It might be worth waiting till the desktop phenoms come out (end of next week?) when their will be many more benchmarks their general performance. As for what the video editing program runs better on depends on what you program you use.
 
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Okay, cheers for the quick replies. I'm going to buy a copy of Adobe Premiere/XP64 to run on it probably or Final Cut Pro/Mac OSX Leopard and dual boot (if I can do that?). The AMD's seem like a good option though.
 
Dual boot shouldn't be a problem, done it with linux and windows, not 100% on osx and windows but i imagine its simple enough. Can't really find a great deal about what those programs will run better on, like i said it might be worth waiting until their are more comprehensive benchmarks on the phenoms. From what i can find at the moment it would seem to be down to your personal preference really.
 
Chimerical said:
Okay, cheers for the quick replies. I'm going to buy a copy of Adobe Premiere/XP64 to run on it probably or Final Cut Pro/Mac OSX Leopard and dual boot (if I can do that?). The AMD's seem like a good option though.
Click to expand...

From what I've seen, applications running on OSX are slower than their XP equivalents.

As to the underlying hardware, I would agree that there isn't a lot in them. At a very rough guesstimate, the Opterons may be slightly cheaper as they don't require FB-DIMMs for operation...
 
Chimerical said:
Right, basically I have the option of buying a £300 dual socket server (Socket F or LGA771) board and either two dual core 5130 Xeons or two AMD "Barcelona" 1.8GHz Quad Core CPU's. Does anyone know the performance of the Opterons, as it seems like I can get an eight-core system AMD for the same price as the Intel version.

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

You may know about it already, but look at Skulltrail (google) comes out early next year and the numbers are looking good!
 
Intel Guy said:
You may know about it already, but look at Skulltrail (google) comes out early next year and the numbers are looking good!
Click to expand...

The thing is that a Skulltrail platform and associated bangles and baubles will cost body parts.

Octo-Barcelona will be very fast out the gate and cost less.
 
Intel Guy said:
Yeah you right, it will be expensive, just wanted to make sure you were aware thats all
Click to expand...

You are absolutely right. However, the most interesting chip will be Nehalem, whenever that apperas, which will fit into Skulltrail (IIRC).

And it's not available at the moment...
 
OSX won't run on it,

OSX is designed for Mac Hardware only,

If you want the best video editing, get a Mac Pro, it will distroy and windows based PC.
 
Cheers for the replies.

peeejayz said:
If you want the best video editing, get a Mac Pro, it will distroy and windows based PC.
Click to expand...

Yeah, going purely for a Mac is an option, but I need the best of both world's really, plus the option to upgrade in the future, not only that but a custom build can obviously be bought in bits and a Mac Pro requires one massive lump sum. The Octo-Core Opteron option looks very good; will wait for some reviews of the Phenom and I'll wait for the Intel Seaburg chipset to be released aswell (as part of Skulltrail I'd imagine).
 
Well, buying a Mac is the only legal way to run both XP and OS X on the same machine.

I'd recommend the Mac Pro, if you feel you don't like Final Cut (which you will, because it's awesome) you could use Windows via Bootcamp and run Premiere. Everyone's a winner.
 
peeejayz said:
If you want the best video editing, get a Mac Pro, it will distroy and windows based PC.
Click to expand...

I'm curious as to how this would manifest itself, as Macs are now based on Windows-compatible hardware?

The only real difference nowadays is in application and subsequent ergonomics of use. As I said, last time I checked benchmarks, when Windows was run via Boot Camp and the same editing application used, the Windows versions ran faster even though emulated...
 
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