David Garnier
Hello,
I'm in the market for a new Java workstation, so I'm looking at bi-Xeons and bi-Opterons. Now here is the catch: I do not have lots of time to spend on coding, and even less time on tinkering my setup, so my workstation must _just_ work. That's why I'm running SuSE: it just work almost without any maintenane.
Now, I've been reading this mailing-list for a while, and it seems that AMD64 users are having a rough ride. Kernel lockups, JVM segfaults... Are those common ? Or is it just the usual 'background noise' ?
On such a list you only hear about problems but seldom success stories ;-)
I'm pretty sure that Opterons are, long-term, a better platform than Xeons. But my question is: does it _just_ work _right_ now?
In my quite biased opinion: Yes.
If Suse 9.1 for AMD64 is still a tad bumpy, can I just install SuSE 9.1 for x32 and expect flawless operation (I don't know if that question really make sense, so please be kind) ? Then I could get an bi-Opteron, wait 6 month for SuSE 9.2 and then finally enjoy the expected 20 or 30% boost (yeah right) brought by the x86-64 architecture.
Secondary question: I would love some benchmarks that focus on Java (compilation and execution), between Opterons and Xeons. It seems that most benchmarks out there focus on rendering 3D scenes and encoding MP3s.
Have a look at the AMD sites or www.spec.org, they might have something, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj SUSE Linux AG, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126