Replies to post #1511 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[yourbankruptcy]

chipguy, Suffice to say that Opteron will not scale like EV7

I disagree. I would agree that "Opteron does not have enough infrestructure to scale like EV7". Opteron is made to scale well from 1 to 8 right of the box, but then you will need a whole bunch of hub translators to scale it further, and I have no idea how well this stuff works now.

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. The proof is also the rumour that AMD is making 4HTT link version for Cray.

To scale Opteron to 32 I beleive you need to use 4P blocks and connect them via hubs. 8P blocks will not be so good.

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. This means that the scaling is very well dependant of the server but not of the chip itself. Better server brings better score. In Opteron case pretty much all 4P servers will be the same.