some advice please --- amd semperon v opteron for dns/mail/nfs freebsd server

[Peter Jeremy]

Greetings and Happy New year to all.

On Sun, 2006-Dec-31 10:58:52 +1100, jonathan michaels wrote:
>anyway, i'm looking to replace both/one of teh dec alphas with a more
>curently supported architecture thats likely to offer simialr
>performance and clean architecture, sorry that my world view.

CPU-performance-wise, almost anything you can buy today will run rings
around an AS2000/500.  Architecture-wide, I haven't seen anything that
comes close to the Alpha.  The AMD64 architecture is "clean" only in
comparison with one of the worst computer architectures ever to see
the light of day.

>my only difficulty is that i do not understand what are the differences
>between the two amd offerings, that is between teh opteron and teh
>semperon ..

Basically, the Sempron is the low-end "desktop" processor and the
Opteron is the high-end "server" processor (similar to the Intel
Celeron vs Xeon naming).  Note that not all Sempron's support amd64
mode - according to the AMD website, all _current_ Sempron processors
support amd64 but I know early ones didn't and I'm uncertain how to
distinguish them without examining the "AMD Features" part of CPUID.

>what sort of motherboards would work best with freebsd,

Have a look at http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html
You might also like to ask on freebsd-amd64

> what if any
>gotchas are thier with the semperon and or teh opteron and which would
>be the best to use in a medium workload,

In terms of meeting your performance requirements, I'd say the CPU is
fairly irrelevant .  In terms of reliability, a good Opteron-based
server with ECC RAM and SCSI (or good SATA) disks is going to be far
more reliable than a whitebox cobbled together around a cheap Sempron
motherboard.  (Of course, it'll also have an extra digit in the price
tag).

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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