Hey Jared - this email is worth copying the list . :) On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not a HW guy either, nor do I play one on TV. > > But I do know some HW guys. The common nickname for Itanium is 'Itanic' > > Make of it what you will. > > The current IO champ in price/performance is not Intel, but AMD Opteron. > > Don't know if it has been through TPC, but I do know some folks that > understand > IO and CPU's down to the bit level, and their choice is Opteron. I > believe HP has > a line of servers with this chip. > > Very fast with Oracle. > > Jared > FWIW I ran Kevin Closson's "silly little benchmark" on some Opteron 8218XE's and Xeon L5320's a couple months ago -- and the Opterons cleaned house. Kevin had a series about the Opterons too. I completely agree that they're very good processors. http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/kevin-closson-index/oracle-on-opteron-k8l-numa-etc/ I've also heard that the Itaniums aren't that great, although I don't have any personal experience. They do seem to have lower priority for receiving Oracle patches and support and such. I was just pointing to the TPC website because it might be useful in trying to persuade a manager to consider Intel alongside IBM. :) -- Jeremy Schneider Chicago, IL http://www.ardentperf.com/category/technical