I was wondering, what is everyone else's take on using an amd machine vs. a p4 machine as a server for webhosting.

Please reply with qualified technical responses, I don't want to make this thread a flamewar.

Thanks,
Brent
Im-Online.Net

Want the true reason? People like the name Intel.

Some people think that they run significantly hotter than Intel, but the reality is, they don't. Another argument is that they run at a lower core frequency than p4's, so they think its slower. The PR rating (2800+ is actually a 2.25 if its the Thoroughbred core), is actually very accurate when compared against the p4 2.8. I prefer AMD's, myself.

I'm switching all of my servers from Intel to AMD chips, the Opteron CPU absolutely smokes any of Intel's chips for server usage. They're cheaper and they run cooler.

There are several reasons we use Intel.

1) We started with Intel's before AMD started to visit the server world. So we continue to use them that way all our components are cross compatible between all our servers.

2) Aside from a few servers, all our servers are actual "Servers" built with server components. Anymore it seems many companies use nothing more then a $500 Dell desktop and turn it into a server. Anyways, until recently with the AMD64 stuff, there was not much available from AMD other then desktop related components.

Beyond that, its mostly whatever you feel most comfortable using.

WinApp

i use AMD cause i just do :)

2) Aside from a few servers, all our servers are actual "Servers" built with server components. Anymore it seems many companies use nothing more then a $500 Dell desktop and turn it into a server. Anyways, until recently with the AMD64 stuff, there was not much available from AMD other then desktop related components.

This is probably the biggest reason most professional company's buy Intel.

We use both, and many AMD 'desktop' components hold up very well in a well designed server enviroment. But, if your looking for a packaged server from a reputable company your not going to find many AMD's until the opteron. Our older amd servers were designed in house for rackmount service, and very few components are on the market for this. But, some of these 'desktops' in 1u and 2u cases have been running for several years.

We are using both Intel and AMD, and thinking to move all to AMD Opteron :)

I think people worry too much about unimportant things like AMD vs. Intel, getting the fastest machine available, etc.

I've always ran Intel... servers and desktops, but it's always been by luck and not choice. Intels have always just been more available to me for one reason or another.

But... I bet I could setup a AMD K2-500 with a bunch of ram and serve a hundred static sites and a dozen PHP communities and no one could tell.

Memory and bandwidth is what's important for webserving.

Don't even TRY to play a game on that K2 tho! :D

-Joe

Originally posted by JetServers
But... I bet I could setup a AMD K2-500 with a bunch of ram and serve a hundred static sites and a dozen PHP communities and no one could tell.

*wonders if you do* :D

Originally posted by Amdac
*wonders if you do* :D

Ha!

No, but it wasn't that long ago that I had my million hits a month site, another one the same size of a customers, and several smaller customers running on a Raq4! (450 mhz I think?) I did have a 1/2 gig of memory in it tho. :)

Btw, I regularly received compliments on how fast those sites were. And the server was waaay up in Edmonton Alberta CA too! Tera-byte had some good BW, I often wish they had more than just Raqs, I'd probably get another server from them.

-Joe

The biggest bottle neck in any modern system is the disk subsystem.

Buy all the 3.0G Intel's you want, unless your running a scsi array it's pointless for anything other than game servers. Even on the desktop, speeding up the HDD subsystem is the biggest improvement you can make. A friend of mine and I were laughing yesturday over a laptop, its a 3gig intel, with a 4200RPM drive. The machine is literally crippled, but they sell because most consumers don't have a clue.

The point is, who makes the chip is the least of your concerns. The system design as a whole for your objective needs to be the primary consideration. But, as Intel has shown, big numbers sell and no matter what you do to try to educate a consumer they are going to buy the big CPU number. Even if you cut every other corner in the machine. 99.9% of the processing power in these servers sit idle for your average web hosting client.

rsanders: You are completely correct. But I'd add that memory is also one of the most mportant things.

And I to have seen what your talking about on a laptop. People are getting suckered into buying these "fast" laptop's but when they get them and try to do any hard file access the machine is crippled.

Thats why I love dell with the 7200rpm hd's in their laptops.

Thanks to everyone who responded to this question.

Sincerely,
Brent Clements
Im-Online.Net

rsanders: You are completely correct. But I'd add that memory is also one of the most mportant things.

Memory is very important, but most people actually put more than they need in a machine. This is good in a linux system, because it can cache files and run a bit smoother. The HDD is usually neglected and not thought of.

I use the toshiba 7200RPM drive in my laptop. Its $200 and some change for the drive, but probably the biggest improvement I made. I have 1G DDR in it, and the difference in adding that HDD was daylight and dark.

BTW, it's an Intel and I don't care either way ;)

I think another reason intel is so popular is becasue the people who buy the servers have heard of dell, and the intell pentuim processors, with gateway, dell, microcenter, etc.. I think it's just becasue almost everyone has heard so much about them and that it's highly marketed and not so much as AMD. Intel is now using a numbering system like AMD from now on instead of the speed.

I used to have Dual Xeons and it was all fine and dandy but when they got fried or broke after years of use it's expensive to replace, so I am now with dual opertons, which is not as fast as dual xeons but it can take the load I throw at it.

Originally posted by SimsFreak
I think another reason intel is so popular is becasue the people who buy the servers have heard of dell, and the intell pentuim processors, with gateway, dell, microcenter, etc.. I think it's just becasue almost everyone has heard so much about them and that it's highly marketed and not so much as AMD. Intel is now using a numbering system like AMD from now on instead of the speed.

I used to have Dual Xeons and it was all fine and dandy but when they got fried or broke after years of use it's expensive to replace, so I am now with dual opertons, which is not as fast as dual xeons but it can take the load I throw at it.

Yes, this is correct, most of the big name servers brands are of course Intel Shops.
However there are rumours about SuperMicro bringing out a Dual Opteron board in a 1u chassis, which should be interesting. Also SATA drives are pretty good now in their price versus speed.

perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't P4 chips generally have larger caches than the AMDs?

We run a dual Athlon MP 2600+ with minor stability issues that I am attributing to cosmic rays. :) I would say that a great reason to use Intel over AMD is that the intel motherboard chipsets are usually higher quality than the VIA and SIS chipsets commonly found on AMD motherboards. Even AMD's own 760MP chipset had issues, and AMD isn't exactly churning out high performance, high quality chipsets like Intel. If it were strictly CPU vs CPU with all else being equal, AMD would be the clear choice since it is a better value.

Has anyone here ever considered using one of those mini-itx epia motherboards for a server? You can fit two of them inside a single 1U case, effectively having two servers in a 1U box. You can only run 1GB of ram per board, and the CPUs are *almost* Pentium 3 class. It would be an interesting experiment. My concerns, other than the obvious limitations, is the quality of the integrated via rhine NIC. A lot of cheaper NICs will stall under heavy TCP loads.

Has anyone here ever considered using one of those mini-itx epia motherboards for a server?

We have a stack of 20 of the 800Mhz ones. They've been in service just over a year, with minimal hardware problems.

Its a good entry level machine for someone that just needs a few sites. Don't try to run a huge amount of bandwidth with one, or get wild with scripts.

Fedora Legacy's main download server was hosted on one in my racks for a while. It would handle spikes up to 20Mbps, but the rsync for the mirrors pretty much maxed the machine out. It passed 1-1.5TB of traffic a month, but wasn't happy about it. Ender had to limit the rsync connections to the mirrors to keep the machine in check. That was probably the hardest we've ran one.

Some of them also were a bit flakey, and only wanted to uplink at 10M with the onboard. I never looked into why.

The biggest thing I notice is they use almost NO power, which is a huge cost savings in a datacenter. I believe the lot of 20 use a combined ~5amps. Only problem you will run into is convincing joe client that his website will run fine on it and not a dual xeon. The biggest reason I don't buy more is they are hard to sell in mainstream hosting.

Has anyone here ever considered using one of those mini-itx epia motherboards for a server?


We picked one of those little machines up from Rob geez had to be over a year ago now. It was used as a file server for several months with no issue at all. Granted it didn't serve files 24x7 but it had to be one of the best machines for uptime we have used :)

I laughed when it was shipped back and opened the box. I thought it was the switch ;) The whole machine is about the size of my keyboard :eek:

So these little ITX thingies actually could be used in a production environment? I'll have to experiment.

What I have in mind is putting two of these suckers in that 1U box, and have one act as the database server, while the other does everything else (web/dns/email/ftp). I was also thinking about squeezing 4 of these into a 2U case. :D

We do a lot of ecommerce sites using osCommerce and our own propietary scripts...pretty much all PHP/MySQL. How many dynamic (oscommerce/vbulletin/invision board) sites could be reaslistically handled with someting like the 1.2 GHz version and a gig of ram? What would be the typical user experience when browsing a website powered by an epia?

We have both AMD and Pentium servers

FSB on pentiums are better
Cache on pentiums are better

Our pentiums outperform our AMD's which are the same clock speed

however, we have more AMD's than pentiums

Originally posted by disgust
perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't P4 chips generally have larger caches than the AMDs?

It's actually the other way around, but it also depends on the two chips you are comparing.

AMD Opterons are actually the way to go now. They can run 64 bit code along side the 32 bit code, are cooler and are actually faster than anything Intel has on the market to date. This is AMD's first MAJOR break away from Intel. I personally have always love AMD, but they were genreally just a little bit behind Intel until now. With Intel, you only have the choice between 32 bit or 64 bit, each one is a different CPU, but with AMD, you can have both on the same chip running at the same time. :) Of course, there's not alot out there right now that can take advantage of this..

I prefer AMD over Intel.

If you run an Opteron on 64-bit linux, is it possible to compile the applications in 64-bit rather than 32-bit, or do the apps need to be written specifically to take advantage of the 64-bit capabilities?

You application needs to to take advantage of the 64 bit memory access otherwise your not taking advantage of the opteron. So yes, you need to write your code to be fully 64 bit, otherwise your just compiling your 32 bit code to run on the 64 bit system.

-Brent

The thing with an opteron though, is it can assign the ram to each cpu so that you can have more ram and it is accessed faster. If I remember the article I read on it correctly.. :) Intel just doesn't have anything that can touch it, it runs the 32 bit code faster than a Xeon even..

Right now, I've been having a lot of headaches with my dual AMD MP system. I can't say that it is any fault of the CPU, or compatibility...but I would take stability over speed at this point.

When it comes to serving up web pages, static or dynamic, I think that available bandwidth would become an issue long before the processors are pushed to a sustained high load, unless the rest of the server hardware & software is not fully optimized.

I would say that the new Prescott P4s run 32-bit code a bit faster than Xeons, if only because they have more memory bandwidth with dual channel DDR400 and the 800 MHz FSB. Of course, P4s can only be run in single CPU configurations. I'm sure the Opterons are quicker in pretty much all respects, but by the time there is widespread support for 64-bit computing, there will be better and cheaper CPUs that totally smoke the opterons. :)

Of course, the opteron will be cheaper and faster and AMD will probably have a newer version of the opteron that will blow it out of the water like the opteron is doing to the xeon now.. :) Wonder when we'll have 128 bit computing... Now THAT'LL be something!

I'd like to see software *try* to keep up with hardware. It seems that just as software arrives that fully exploits the power of said hardware, there is something newer and better already available. We've had 32-bit computing since the 386, and it really hasn't changed in all those years. I do not think that the era of 64-bit computing will last quite as long before it is replaced with something even better.

Just take a look at any 3D video card on the market. Even the bottom-of-the-barrel units feature a 128-bit GPU or better. GPUs are infact becoming MORE complex than CPUs, so the technology to make a 128-bit or even 256-bit CPU is here and practically applicable as far as mass-production is concerned.

Now THAT would be interesting. Of course, with windows being a closed source software, it'll be another 30 years before it can handle 128 or 256 bit computing. Heck, it still can't reliably handle 64 bit...

A lot of people prefer to use an Intel Chip over an AMD Processor due to the heat AMD processors give out, and if you are planning on sticking all your server hardware in 1U Chassis, Intel processors are more attractive.

However, with the Athlon 64, the heat of a single processor has decreased quite a bit compared to the thoroughbred processors which were earlier versions of the XP processors

Here are some other reasons:

Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Athlon 2500+ (1.833GHz)

Many people do not understand the concepts of architecture, and that although the Pentium 4 2.53 has 623,000,000 clock cycles a second more than that of an Athlon 2500, the Athlon can out perform the Pentium due to the architecture and the way the processor deals with instructions, the external clock speed is not all that matters, the 3 other concepts are: FSB, Cache and architecture, both the Intel and AMD set of processors are designed by different companies with different ideas to how a processor should work.

For the price, the power and performance, AMD processors are very good, and very much work using, and the 64bit Opterons do give some great performance over an Xeon for MySQL (IIRC)

But, though being a huge fan of AMD mainly because of the price at first, but now the power and the amount I can overclock it without much heat increase (1833 - 2200 ;)) I would still choose an intel chip over that of an AMD if the purpose needed it.

For example, game servers, general web servers etc, I would go for AMD - probably barton

For heavy MySQL, I would go for AMD or Intel, but mainly because of high cache levels and higher FSB, MySQL uses the RAM a lot, so a lot of accessing occurs, a higher FSB allows for higher speeds in accessing, within reason, it does also depend a lot on the CL of the RAM <-- another story for a different day.

Ok, not too much of a biased input there, hope it was usefull

Regards

DislexiK