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

[soralx at cydem.org]

My hat off to all, may you have a pleasant New Year.

On Mon, 1 Jan 2007 12:38:45 +1100
Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:
> >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

More precisely, Sempron is a castrated version of the regular Athlon64:
smaller cache, and also they tend to be in the bottom end of FSB
frequency and multiplier, I believe.

Note that there are 3 generations of Sempron: socket A (never 64-bit),
then Sockets 754 (later, ~ 1 year old, steppings are 64-bit) and
[obscure] 939, and now Socket AM2 (all AMD64; technically, these are
still an K8 generation, yet worth mentioning separately).

What I'd recommend is either to get a full-blown Opteron or regular
Athlon64 (for performance, if finances permit), or better wait a little
until AMD release more energy efficient Semprons (65nm process?). The
latter would definitely be the option to my linking if CPU performance
is not of big importance.

Definitely consider recent SCSI: very reliable (both the interface and
hard drives), and FreeBSD is quite happy and error-tolerant with the
interface (at least when using certain host bus adapters). Crazy fast,
too -- handy for mail and file servers.
I have no experience with SATA myself, but from what I know, seems like
a good option: cheap (to make a mirrored array at small cost) and
usually reliable.

[SorAlx]  ridin' VN1500-B2