On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Dave Youatt wrote:
> Do you think it's due to the new internal interconnect, that bears a
> strong resemblance to AMD's hypertransport (AMD's buzzword for borrowing
> lots of interconnect technology from the DEC alpha (EV7?)), or Intel
> fixing a not-so-good initial implementation of "hyperthreading" (Intel's
> marketing buzzword) from a few years ago.
It certainly looks like it's Intel finally getting the interconnect right,
because I'm seeing huge improvements in raw memory speeds too. That's the
one area I used to see better results from Opterons on sometimes, but
Intel pulled way ahead on this last upgrade. The experiment I haven't
done yet is to turn off hyperthreading and see how much the performance
degrades. This is hard because I'm several thousand miles from the
servers I'm running the tests on, which makes low level config changes
somewhat hairy.
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* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD