[K12OSN] Re: Xeon vs Opteron

[John Baillie]

Robert,

I built two dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon 800 fsb servers in December.
Here are the part and pieces:
http://secure.newegg.com/app/WishR.asp?ID=1116068

They have been on line for about three weeks now. The performance is
Very Good, but we had one lock up today. I did some research on the
errors and one web page mentions these processors as being suspect.
Other pages point to faulty ram or pci card not being seated correctly.
Have not narrowed it down yet. 

Here are the errors:

Jan 19 11:54:21 thomas kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 21
on CPU 0.
Jan 19 11:54:21 thomas kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to
continue
Jan 19 11:54:21 thomas kernel: Do you have a strange power saving mode
enabled?
Jan 19 11:55:31 thomas kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 31
on CPU 0.
Jan 19 11:55:31 thomas kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to
continue
Jan 19 11:55:31 thomas kernel: Do you have a strange power saving mode
enabled?


If I was to do over I'd look into a different mother board (the nics
were not detected right off). The scsi card Adaptec 64-bit Ultra320 SCSI
Card, Model "2060100" was not detected either and the specs lead you to
believe that "hardware" raid works with Linux it doesn't so I ended up
using software raid. The case is also a little pricey but very roomy,
well built, fairly quiet and if it's important aesthetically appealing.
I ran into problems installing k12ltsp 4.2. and dropped back to 4.1. It
is possible that there is some sort of weirdness with this particular
hardware and the Fedora core 3 kernel. I'll be looking into getting 4.2
installed over spring break. Oh I also purchased a Thermaltake VA3000
mid-tower case which was not well suited to dual processor. Heat sync's
interfere with 2 drive bays. 

John



Robert wrote:

Which cpu would you recommend for a multi user environment like k12ltsp
Anyone have any personal experience to compare. 

The following cpu cost the same

----------------------------------------
Xeon 2.8 EM64T 1MB cache 800 FSB
Advantage:
Hyperthreading (With HT kernel sees double the cpus)

Opteron 242 
Advantage:
Built in memory controller (beats xeon on most benchmarks)
----------------------------------------

Would your choice be different on single cpu vs dual cpu server?

Robert Arkiletian