http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/04/01/30/05FElinux_2.html

Looks like opteron is really showing its muscles in the benchmarks Im seeing.

Is this the beginning of the end for Intel.


They just released prescott which is currently nothing special but will prolly scale well like the P4 cause they further incresed the pipeline to 31. However the way it stands currently it under preforms the current Northwood core P4's.

IBM (not so recently) and recently gateway and HP are starting to sell opterons. That is practically every major computer manufacturing company with the exception of indell.

I am curious about how the opteron will preform for gameservers. Does anyone have any ideas or opinions?

yup

Haha yeah 31 stages, 31 I mean WHAT? the Athlon has 10 from what I remember, the G5 has 14.

well they added better branch prediction but they kept the amount of space for cached results the same. I dunno how it will affect it.

well, the more stages you have, the longer it takes to recover from a branch misprediction. every stage needs to be cleared and reloaded.

also, if data is not in cache and needs to be loaded from RAM, it takes more time and with a longer pipeline it takes even longer.

the benefit from a 31 stage pipeline is the ability to have higher clock speeds. the main point of higher clock speeds is to brag "5 ghz" or some high number (for the marketing and advertising guys). actual performance, however, will lag far behind a processor with a bit slower clock speed but less stages.

^^ Spot on, the more you can do in one clock cycle, the better, this is the athlon/g5 strategy

Intels is
'OMG LOOK OUR PROCESSOR GOES AT 32 GIGAHERTZ AND EMITS GAMMA RAYS ITS SO FAST ITS RADIOACTIVE!'