What the Chip War Means for Your Data Center
Should you standardize on AMD or Intel? It depends, say our experts.
Intel's advantages include a new CPU microarchitecture that outlines the organization and types of functional blocks inside the CPU, and which shows good performance benchmarks; an aggressive road map of new processor introductions and server platform stability through this year. Against Intel is the new memory module for its high-end server chipsets and systems, which uses a lot of power.
Historically, the high-performance computing market on which we focus has been using AMD, but it's not as simple as saying just choose X brand. With the new Core Microarchitecture from Intel, both AMD and Intel offer roughly equivalent performance for a wide variety of workloads. One exception is large SMP systems (where AMD 4-processor systems are generally cheaper and capable of more RAM), which are typically used for database servers.
As it stands today, the only reason to use only one manufacturer's chips is if you want to have a standard configuration. Using a single processor family allows you to create an initially simplified environment: a single kernel, one set of compiler settings. But even new installations do not stay homogeneous for very long.
microprocessors
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