On 6 Feb 2006, at 3:19 pm, Chris Dagdigian wrote: > >> Results of the tests revealed that the SGI Altix 330 using shared >> memory and unmatched I/O throughput achieved superior >> performance and ran faster than twice the number of cores in >> comparable AMD dual core Opteron-based systems. They also chose fairly slow Opterons (2.2GHz). They've chosen a set of applications (FP-intense MPI codes) which are bound to favour Altix-like architectures, and the Itanium2. Plus the observations others have already made. For integer based and embarrassingly parallel workloads where the interconnect doesn't matter so much, the difference will be much smaller, and probably in Opteron's favour. But all that aside, I still want to ask the question: how much more does the 16-way Altix 330 cost than the 8-way dual core Opteron? What's the price-performance? Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute GPG: 1024D/E3134233 FE3D 6C73 BBD6 726A A3F5 860B 3CDD 3F56 E313 4233