Intel EMT64 Xeon vs AMD Opteron

[Freebsd9999 at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/4/05 11:29:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
scottl at freebsd.org writes:
> D'oh. One other thing. In the benchmarks I've seen, Opterons "Play
> Nicer" with SMP because of the Hypertransport setup in some
> applications. (IE, they don't fight over memory the way Xeons do).
> Look for a motherboard that uses a "4+4" or "4+2" memory configuration
> to take full advantage of this. (Differnt memory for each processor,
> kinda)

:With FreeBSD, it's a bit of a toss-up.  There is no strong affinity
:set or enforced between process memory and where the process is running.
:Having some notion of affinity (i.e. NUMA support) would be a good
:thing.  Oh, and the 4+2 configurations are typically pretty poor,
:regardless.

And since i386 is clearly a better supported platform because of its
must wider use, it make sense to choose the better supported
platform in the case of a performance wash, at least until there is
compelling evidence that an opteron platform is better in any way. 
Arguing architecture is completely and totally useless. The proof 
of the pudding is in the taste, and just because an architecture 
has the potential to be better doesn't mean that it plays out that 
way in real world implementations. 

And my dealer has a 3.0Ghz xeon at $130. less 
than opteron 246s, so where are you doing your shopping, if you 
think that  they are "about the same"?