Does anyone else have any decent comparisons of more real-world apps (not just synthetic benchmarks) between differing 64bit archs, especially opteron vs Intel?
"Intel" means Xeon here really, the ia64 is so exotic, I haven't seen any offered in the shops, let alone a Linux distro for it. For my thesis I ran the benchmark of the fftw library on various processors. The fftw code dynamically optimises itself at runtime; for scientific number crunching applications I decided that this test was therefore reasonably good. Results had a strong dependence on advanced processors features (i.e. mainly sse/sse2 for Intel, 3dnow for AMD), which was expected. Results also had a strong dependency on data width. The Opteron is unbeatable for single floats, but the Xeon came off a little better for double floats. The difference between single and double is significant, therefore being able to control the processing width in an application can become important. (Rumour has it matlab runs everything at least double - not so hot). The altivec unit in a G4 performed comparatively poorly and only does single float anyway, leaving that architecture without special hardware support for double. The results showed that. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.