Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mas]

It will be give and take depending on benchmark but I expect Horus to have the edge. Both have quads as their base unit so Potomac will still have 4 sharing a 667 fsb but it will have a combined 36Mb on-board cache between the 4 processors although a Horus quad will have an external 64Mb cache for holding other quad's memory data. A Horus 4 quad setup has the same interconnect cpu bandwidth as a Superdome ( 1Gb/s each way per cpu) so it's only when it goes to 8 quads (32 cpus, 64 if dual-core) that I expect its scaling to start to suffer against traditional backplane enterprise servers like IBM's and HP's. Considering that Sun already uses Newisys designs it would still be the favorite despite what they cook up indoors although somebody else could quite easily sell it. I think the Horus is a good design which should take Opteron a hunting in the 16+ cpu range. Further difficult questions will be asked of the current encumbents.

If you need proof of that you know who to ask!

Well it all depends when you ask him, now or before his amnesia and Damascus conversion c2001 .