Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers?atomcommentsDWiki2019-06-15T02:07:23ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers.By Chris Siebenmann on /blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServerstag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers:07d7a33a2942d57f4b439f7056c6610cb97c2b39Chris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>We care about overall server price, and right now it appears that at
least Dell is targeting higher end servers with their AMD based units.
On a CPU to CPU basis the AMD servers might be cheaper or competitive (I
haven't tried to check), but we do not generally buy higher end servers;
we mostly only have the money to get inexpensive 1U servers.</p>
<p>(Most servers that we deploy don't have high performance needs, but we
want to get as many of them as we can for a fixed amount of money. More
servers is more important to us than more powerful servers.)</p>
<p>In general, vendors like Dell seem to only be dipping their toes into the
AMD waters, especially in 1U. Most of their servers are still Intel CPUs.</p>
</div>2019-06-15T02:07:23ZBy Computer on /blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServerstag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers:a6e1a8f5bbcd8f679ad7530b4211156fdc2b255eComputer<div class="wikitext"><p>You say "at competitive price". It was my understanding that comparable AMD chip was much less $?</p>
</div>2019-06-15T00:16:06ZBy Chris Siebenmann on /blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServerstag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers:6f8aa67da87857eef096ccbb0fb739faa2c17aa5Chris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>Intel versus AMD is totally transparent to us, and it's transparent
enough to our users that none of them have complained (and even if they
did, we probably would shrug and say 'those are what compute machines we
have available, feel free to fund more from your grants'). In general,
our collection of Intel-based servers isn't from deliberate choice,
it's just that most of the servers available to buy off the shelf have
historically been Intel-based (as have been donated ones). Our current
round of AMDs are actually hand-built from parts, which is an exception
to our usual practice.</p>
<p>(We have had some AMD compute servers in the past, but only sporadically.
We did have a long run of 1U AMD-based servers, in the form of Sun's
Sunfire X2100 and X2200 units, which we were pretty fond of in general.
Some of them are still alive and in service, even.)</p>
</div>2019-06-14T15:24:16ZBy Liam Greenwood on /blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServerstag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/IntelMDSKillsOldServers:41932e52e015b3c47145166eec612ebc83ff2813Liam Greenwood<div class="wikitext"><p>Are you able to deploy the AMD boxes in parallel with Intel compute boxes? Is running on AMD vs Intel totally transparent to your users running jobs, and to your software builds?</p>
<p>Thanks
Cheers, Liam
UNC</p>
</div>2019-06-14T12:47:39Z