Re: which dual-CPU hardware/OS is fastest for PostgreSQL?

while you weren't looking, Greg Stark wrote:

> Back in the day, we used to have problems with our 1U dual pentiums. We
> attributed it to heat accelerating failure. I would fear four opterons in 1U
> would be damned hard to cool effectively, no?

Opterons actually run pretty coolly, comparatively.  If it's a big
concern, you can always drop a few more clams for the low-voltage
versions -- available in 1.4 and 2.0 GHz flavors, and of which I've
heard several accounts of their being run successfully /without/
active cooling -- or punt until later this year, when they ship
Winchester core Opterons (90nm SOI -- the current, uniprocessor
silicon fabbed with that process has some 3W heat dissipation idle,
~30W under full load; as a point of contrast, current 90nm P4s have
34W idle dissipation, and some 100W peak).

We have a number of 1U machines (P4s, I believe), and a Dell blade
server (six or seven P3 machines in a 3U cabinet) as our webservers,
and none of them seem to have any trouble with heat.  That's actually
a bigger deal than it might first seem, given how frighteningly
crammed with crap our machine room is.

/rls

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:wq