Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

Let me prove you that Alpha does not scale so well by itself. See, the
score of AlphaServer ES40, 4-way SMP, EV6.7 (21264A) 667 MHz, 8 MB
L2 cache is 400, but the score of AlphaServer ES40, 4-way SMP, EV6.8
833 MHz, 8 MB L2 cache is 350.

What does the scalability of EV6x systems have to do with EV7? Pure
obfuscation on your part.

Opteron scales very good from 1 to 2, and very good from 2 to 4.
Then from 4 to 8 will bear some penalty, because redundant HTT links
in 4P will not be redundant anymore.

You are ignoring the problem of Opteron's cheap and dirty broadcast
coherency scheme. You better go check the size of the memory read
latency penalty when you go from 1 to 2 Opterons before making claims
like this.The distributed directory scheme of EV7 is more complex and
silicon intensive but has much better scalability. But that's ok, the EV7
was intended for big iron applications, the Opteron wasn't.