RE: AMD vs Xeon 64 bit

>> The savings are tremendous, and instead of doing maintenance
contracts, you just buy a spare machine ;-) One of the things that SUN is doing is talking about how great Solaris is. Solaris is great but that is only important to the IT department not to the end users (business sense?)          

...Jumping machine architecture also mean database migration. There are still enough databases that people can't take off their current machine architecture
just to benefit from the price/performance (significant) of modern commodity
servers.

        >>My take on the RISC - x86 thing is that AMD is pushing Intel very hard at the moment.

...and you'll be hearing noise about the newly released Xeon 71x0 series which fattens up
all the way to 16MB L2 in an attempt to cover the fact that the memory controller
is still not on chip as it is with Opteron. There are Oracle workloads that
the new Xeaon 7100 will offer about 15% performance increase over today's Opteron
processors, but to get that you have to endure 150watt versus 90watt power consumption
and the associated heat dissipation. Not a good tradeoff if you have a hundred
servers         

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