RE: [tlug] Re: Opterons have arrived

[patrick.niessen@example.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Lee [mailto:sl@example.com] 
> Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 3:29 PM
> To: tlug@example.com
> Subject: [tlug] Re: Opterons have arrived
> 
 
> It'd be great to have a dual opteron board, but 70k for just 
> the board, not to the price of 2 CPUs, is a bit steep for me...

You can always sell your Organs for the privilege of owning the first
generation processor of the Mainstream 64Bit era  ;-)  But what would you do
with so much performance?  Maybe your HDD will be the bottleneck for many
applications like video encoding...
 
> Are AMD64 linux able to run 32 bit apps?  You can at least 
> recompile the kernel then...

Yeah, as opposed to Itanium they have a "64 Bit extended instruction set" in
addition to 32 Bit Instructions.  Itanium is full 64Bit and so has to
emulate 32 Bit which costs performance. AMD says that that will help
companies to move to 64Bit without the pain, as many commercial packages
like Oracle will take a long time to be available in native mode. Quite a
clever move I think, no IT-Manager needs to delay the purchase of new
Opteron based products now because the software is not ready.  So AMD is
able to get return on investment starting today rather than in the future.

You could compile the kernel if the compiler has the Opteron capability.
But another problem will be the various devices drivers needed for all the
new technologies like hyper transport, PCI-X, ...

Patrick