Thread: AMD vs Intel

AMD vs Intel

From
Johan Loubser
Date:
I am tasked with getting specs for a postgres database server for the
core purpose of running moodle at our university.
The main question is at the moment is 12core AMD or 6/8core (E Series)
INTEL.

What would be the most in portend metric in planning an enterprise level
server for moodle.

--
Johan Loubser
(021) 8084036
Informasie Tegnologie
University of Stellenbosch

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Re: AMD vs Intel

From
Albe Laurenz
Date:
Johan Loubser wrote:
> I am tasked with getting specs for a postgres database server for the
> core purpose of running moodle at our university.
> The main question is at the moment is 12core AMD or 6/8core (E Series)
> INTEL.
> 
> What would be the most in portend metric in planning an enterprise level
> server for moodle.

I know too little about hardware to give an answer, but there are a few
things to consider:

- The faster each individual core is, the faster an individual
  query will be processed (in-memory sorting, hash tables etc.).

- More cores will help concurrency, but maybe not a lot: often it is
  I/O bandwidth that is the limiting factor for concurrency.

I think the best thing would be to estimate the amount of data,
concurrent users and operations per second you expect.

There is the excellent book "PostgreSQL High Performance" by Greg Smith
that I would recommend to read.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Re: AMD vs Intel

From
David Boreham
Date:
On 9/4/2013 3:01 AM, Johan Loubser wrote:
> I am tasked with getting specs for a postgres database server for the
> core purpose of running moodle at our university.
> The main question is at the moment is 12core AMD or 6/8core (E Series)
> INTEL.
>
> What would be the most in portend metric in planning an enterprise
> level server for moodle.
>

The only way to be sure is to test your workload on the two different
machines.

That said, we moved from AMD to Intel E series Xeon a year ago. We were
using 8-core AMD devices not 12, and switched to 6-core Intel. The Intel
devices were more attractive due to their (much) higher single-core
performance. Another factor was a history of hardware bugs in the
support chips used on AMD systems that we haven't generally seen with
Intel. So all other things being equal, Intel brings less hassle, in my
experience.