Phenom II vs. i7 930 for scientific computing, which one?

[prtc]

Hello,

I'm setting up a small cluster for scientific computing and would like to know your opinions on what would be the best choise: AMD Phenom 965 or Intel i7 930?

AMD classically has been considered better for my kind of application (floating point operations dominate by far) but on the other hand most of the compilers are Intel. But again, AMD is 30% cheaper which would translate in more nodes in the computer.

help?!?

many thx
paula

[CPUShack]

The AMD also consumes slightly less power (125W vs 130W)

It also has twice the L1 and twice the L2 cache, but a slightly smaller L3 cache (6mb vs the i7s 8m)

I think that the extra cache, as well as the fact you can add 30% more systems for the same price will outweigh any advantage the i7 may have

The AMD also has a pretty easy upgrade to the 6-core version as the price drops on it to allow for such an upgrade (and they have a 95W version for even less power consumption)

[Qwerty]

Perhaps you should think about using AMD Opterons for your cluster. They have more cores and are much more suitable for massive parallel computation tasks due to their system architecture.

I know that Opterons with 12 cores are not very cheap, but a server motherboard with 4x Opterons (with 48 cores in total) will need only one case, PSU, network and video cards.

The bottom line is that such a system could cost less than 12 computers (with 12x motherboards, 12x PSUs and so on) containing 1x Quad-Core Phenom per system.

[prtc]

thanks for the replies. it helped a lot. unfortunately here (brazil) the opteron is still too expensive, more than buying the equivalent numbers of quad-cores systems... :-\

[gshv]

You may take a look at six-core Phenoms. They have lower frequency than 965, but if you application will load all six cores then you may get better performance from one processor.

Gennadiy