[BUGS] hardware changing time .. moving forward

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Jonathan,

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:09:48 +1100
jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:

> i have been partial to teh intel zeon since it started as a
> pentium pro (ok something like that) ... i had settled on teh
> amd offering but now i'm not so sure which fork in teh road, is
> it amd 64 bit or is it to be teh 64 bit zeon ??
> 
> i'd like to get into 64 bit sooner but am now confused as to
> which architecture would be the most sutible for use with bsd
> at least .. please  

It shouldn't make any difference as far as BSD is concerned:
they both have the same instruction set.  There are some
differences with respect to their hardware support for
virtualization, but since FreeBSD doesn't do that yet, that's
not an issue.  NetBSD does Xen, but I don't know much about it.
Presumably there are special versions for the amd64 or the em64t
extensions.  The biggest compatibility issues are likely to be
(as usual) related to the support chipset peripherals, interrupt
routing and BIOS.

> which fork please .. amd/zeon and/or some thoughts as to why
> one would be more suitble ?

There's no "more suitable" here.  There is only price vs
performance.

> if it is that one is not more 'suitable' then why is amd
> seening this 'fallout', these problems as freebsd moves forward ? 

AMD's problem is that while they trumped intel by getting a
64-bit processor with good performance, that people could
readily use, to the maket first, intel has come back with a
compatible chip of their own that is faster, and they've been
squeezing AMD on prices.  You can buy a low-end AMD64 chip
for AUS$40: there can't be all that much margin for them in
that.  On top of that they've had to delay their much-hyped
quad-processor part for about a year, because it didn't work
somehow.  So: AMD's problems are business and engineering
related.  The chips are still great (just slightly less great
than the Core2 Xeons, at the moment.)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew