[R] [Way OT] New hardware

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Martin Maechler wrote:

> >>>>> "Sean" == Sean Davis <sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov>
> >>>>>     on Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:16:02 -0400 writes:
> 
>     Sean> Can anyone share experience with opteron versus the
>     Sean> xeon (woodcrest) for R under linux?  I am looking at
>     Sean> using 16-32Gb of ram in a workstation (as opposed to a
>     Sean> server).
> 
> Hmm, not that I'd be an expert...
> If you want to use so much RAM you want to use a 64-bit
> architecture and software (OS, libraries, compilers,...), right?
> AFAIK, that's been known to work well with Opterons and different
> flavors of Linuxen (e.g. we have dual
> Opterons, one with Redhat Enterprise and two with Ubuntu 6.06).
> 
> Now I read that there are 64-bit Xeons with "EMT64" (which is
> said to be Intel's emulation of AMD64), so in principle the same
> versions of Linux and R should run there as well.
> Since I haven't heard of any success stories
> I'm interested as well, in reports from R users.

There have been several posted here or R-devel.  Things do change, but 
every time we have had a formal test, Opterons were considerably better 
than Xeons on performance/£.

[BTW, I don't think you will get a workstation motherboard that takes 32Gb 
of RAM (although things change fast):  my own machine has a server 
motherboard in a small tower case.]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595