Financial firms start lining up for AMD Roadrunner systems

For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not …

[Nate Amsden]

i suppose

one good thing on this board is at least they have the option of using 12 DIMMs per CPU. I always thought it strange that it seemed like nobody other than HP provided the full 12 DIMMs on the Opteron 6xxx motherboards. Everyone else - as far as I could tell (Tyan included - just checked again their latest & greatest is still 8 slots/cpu) topped out at 8. HP doesn't have 12 DIMMs per socket on the blades since there isn't enough space on the blade to do it. I believe the extended ATX form factor has similar constraints, though most server vendors use proprietary form factors anyway.

With VDI - I suspect the software licensing and storage costs etc will not make it worth while to skimp on lower tier hardware for the server end of things.

Give me HP Advanced ECC or IBM Chipkill for anything with more than 16GB of memory. The risks involved with bad ram on Tyan/Supermicro systems are too high. I believe the newer Xeons have some additional enhanced ECC stuff on them, which helps Dell and other folks that don't have their own advanced memory protection. Opterons lack this support on-chip though(as far as I know).

[BornToWin]

This will help

These units will help enterprise and AMD. A 50+ % drop in cost with equal or better performance depending on the application, is a good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This will help

That's a big "depending." We found the last generation of Opterons to be generally inferior in performance to Xeons even a couple generations older. Only in graphics-intensive operations did the Opterons occasionally outperform the Xeons.