AMD or Intel?

[Eric Anderson]

Decibel! wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2007, at 3:24 PM, Palle Girgensohn wrote:
>> --On torsdag, torsdag 13 sep 2007 15.07.17 -0400 Francisco Reyes 
>> <lists at stringsutils.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Palle Girgensohn writes:
>>>
>>>> Now, I hear rumors that AMD is to be preferred over Intel for
>>>> performance
>>>
>>> From what I have read in the past, specially in the postgresql list, it
>>> seems the AMD64 cpus do better with Postgresql. Possibly because of
>>> better bus architecture.
>>
>> I think this is not current information; the new woodcrest 
>> architecture performs mucg better, although this is deduced from this 
>> thread's discussion...
> 
> Except this thread has largely glossed over the importance of memory 
> bandwidth, which is exactly the reason why Opterons have been beating 
> Xeons for several years. Last I'd heard, things were fairly close 
> between the two, but that would matter on how many cores and physical 
> CPUs you have.

This is still true, even with the latest Intel Cores.  For stuff that 
does massive memory work, AMD's seem to be faster.  However, for 
non-memory intensive applications, the Intel procs are smokin' fast.


> It would be good if someone could do a database benchmark for some of 
> the larger parts.
> 
> Something else worth mentioning... a lot of work is being done to 
> improve PostgreSQL scalability for larger numbers of CPUs. If you're 
> looking at anything over 4 cores, I recommend going to 8.3 ASAP.


Hmm.  Sounds like you know a lot about database stuff (database 
architect!), maybe you would be a perfect candidate for the benchmark? :)

Blue Skies!
Eric