<div class="gmail_quote">2011/10/24 Gong Ding <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gdiso@ustc.edu">gdiso@ustc.edu</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div>Hi all<br>We'd like to buy one more computation node for TCAD simulation.<br>The simulation code is based on petsc, 90% of the time spend on linear solver.<br>Krylov solvers such as BCGS/GMRES and MUMPS solver are mostly used.<br>
<br>Now we have two choise, one is based on Intel XEON E5620 (4 Core) and <br>the othre is based on AMD Opteron 6128 (8 Core).<br>The tow CPUs are nearly at the same price.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>For sparse linear algebra, you are buying memory bandwidth. In this case, the Xeon has 3 channels of DDR3-1066 for an aggregate bandwidth of 25.5 GB/s where as the 6128 has 4 channels of DDR3-1333 for an aggregate bandwidth of 42.6 GB/s. Note however, that you are probably less likely to fully utilize the bandwidth on the Opteron because it has a deeper NUMA hierarchy. It's probably still faster, but probably not by much. If you get the Opteron, be sure to get a motherboard that supports DDR3-1333 and actually get the fast memory.</div>
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