AMD question

[Bozo]

If you were going to build a server to run OpenVMS, what 64 Bit AMD processor and what motherboard would you use?

Same question but with dual AMD 64s?

Thanks,

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Santilli]

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qspro.html

Then I have room for two more, if the price drops.

Seriously, Xeons are a lot more reasonable, likewise Supermicro motherboards...

s

 

[Pradeep]

Xeons, with their shared memory bus, don't give a great boost in performance.

Remember that for 4-way Xeon operation, you need the Xeon MPs, and they are not cheap at all.

 

[Santilli]

You think 4 grand for a 2mb cache, 2.8 Ghz processor is a bit much?
Boy, in that light, forget what I said. The Athlons are looking like a great deal, or a dual Xeon system, using the regular Xeons.
(Greg gets foot out of mouth, barely)

s

 

[Mercutio]

Athlon64s can run OpenVMS?

 

[Bozo]

HP is porting OpenVMS to Itainium. Hopefully it will also run on Opterons.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

Er, Itanium uses its own, vastly different 64-bit instruction set.
As I understand things, even current Intel samples with x86-64 support don't fully implement AMD's spec.

And of course there's going to be some "big iron" snobbery from HP that will probably serve to keep OpenVMS off commodity hardware anyway.

But I don't know of any enterprise-ready Athlon64 motherboards. I still haven't forgiven Tyan for the short-bus-special AthlonMP products it made, and Tyan is the only manufacturer of AMD boards I'd put even think about putting in a real server. I'd like to see a little competition in that area myself.

 

[Bozo]

The more I dig into this, the more it looks like you're right Merc.
The Xeons now have 64bit capacity, but I think it's different than the Itaniums. And Itanium CPUs and motherboards are hard to find; through normal channels anyway.
I just can't see spending between $53K and $93K (Alphas) for a server when it could be built for $10k or less.
Maybe we could run Linux....

Bozo :mrgrn: