22 replies to this topic

[SpleenBeGone]

What kind of card do you have that overheated? o.O

[SpleenBeGone]

What kind of extra cables do you have? And can you post your case? Maybe I can keep this from happening again. >.>

[SpleenBeGone]

You could always cut down unused lines and tape them over like they did before modular ones.

virtual 8 cores from an i7, or logical ones off of a xeon?

[SpleenBeGone]

Oh boo, those things are paper weights.

[SpleenBeGone]

They're not technically 8 cores though, and the Opterons based on the same thing get smoked by xeons. Plus, I believe after all the fixes the 8150's got less than a 10% increase in performance. What would you be doing that needs more than two server cores anyways?

[SpleenBeGone]

I should have said 8 dedicated cores, sorry. Every pair of cores shares a few resources that end up bottlenecking it. That's why everything up to quad threaded programs they perform better with each module cut in half. Ivy bridge, although being more expensive, is around 70% more productive in what you want to do, along with using 60% the power. Over the course of a year, you'd save around $40 in electrical off of it, if you're paying for that yourself. Assuming the average 4 year upgrade cycle on high end parts, you'd easily pay the difference in electrical.

Edit: This could all change with Piledriver though, if they manage to get it out before Haswell.

[SpleenBeGone]

I'd like to see, as the numbers I'm using are under a pure *nix environment, or windows server 2008.
Although nearly every thing I've seen on heavy threaded applications there's > 5% difference. The exception to this being heavily threaded photoshop tools, in that instance Zambezi actually outperforms all the quad core sandy chips.

All that being said, you really can't go wrong with the high end chips from either company at this point in most instances. And if you do decide to go with the 8150, I suggest a very good cooling solution so you can OC it, as sql scales very well with clock rate.

Edit: If you wanted some real world numbers, in a situation that you'd be in, I have both an i5 and i7, and can section off 2 cores and 2 cores/4 threads on a VM, load them up with whatever SQL test you come up with, and run BF3, WoW, etc.

[SpleenBeGone]

Ah, but remember there's the IB now, you're looking at closer to a 20% difference, and from a 77w part. As far as the cooling, the little 2/4 setups can overclock around that high with the cpu fan at 100%, but overall the FX range has really terrible thermals. Now, as far as thread counts, you have to keep in mind that even though you're going to have 8 cores, only 4 will be dedicated to the server, and 4 more for whatever else. Clock for clock, two sandy cores beat out two bulldozer modules in performance, and Ivy even more so.. The closest representation I can find is an i3-2120 vs a FX-4100.


Now, in real word conditions, as the tests you linked show, things are a bit different. VM 4.1 runs horribly on an i7 chip. Hopefully this is something that gets fixed in the future though. The benchmark I referenced was using VM on a SB Xeon and Interlagos Opteron, where the 6 core Xeon scored a 63ms response time over a 170ms time on the Opteron: http://www.anandtech.com/print/5058
Considering the only real difference between core and xeon is the xeons are binned higher, I assumed that VM would work equally well on each. For down, in the desktop chips, the bulldozer performs better it seems. I'd keep an eye out for a VM update before you buy one though, to see if they improve performance on the i7, because if they do, for mysql purposes, the intel chip would smoke the amd one.

Also, WoW hasn't run on a single core for a very long time, and the new 64 bit client not only fills all 4 cores of my i5, but loads them quite well, as well as the BF3 multiplayer, which is why I suggested the two.

[SpleenBeGone]

I did a bit of research on cooling for the 8150 to help you out if you go for it, it seems that you can expect around 4.6ghz stable on a good air cooler, which would be a decent increase in performance, if you get a case that can provide good airflow. the 3770, if there's an update by then can get to 4.9, and a 2600k to 5ghz even. (odly, SB runs cooler than IB)

[SpleenBeGone]

Ah, I assumed that sql would be your main focus, from what we had discussed earlier. Good luck then.