Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"Is anyone making similar or better AMD-based equipment?"

There are several manufacturers of dual AhtlonMP servers. Racksaver is one, Polywell is another. Both of those companies plan to have dual Opterons in the late April timeframe. Got a couple of questions though. How much memory do you need? Drive space? You seem to indicate your server needs are CPU bound.

At this point in time a Racksaver 1U, model 1129 with 4Gig of RAM, 108GBbyes of SCSI hard drives, DR-R/W, dual 10/100 ethernet and a dual AthlonMP 2400+ runs aboutr $5.515 with Linux. Win2k adds another $1k. Now if you need more than 4GBytes oof RAM, then this won't work for you. Hmm, a dual Xeon 2.4 runs about the same price ($150 more) for a similar configuration and with the E7500 chipset. Which one provides the best performance? It depends on what you are doing. There are comparison reviews out there with various applications, not knowing what applications you want to run, or even the OS, it's a tough call.

You may or may not get better performance once (and let's face it, if) AMD gets the Opterons out. Again, it depends on what you are doing. There should be quad Opterons out by the end of the year running much faster than 800MHz, though...