What Are the Differences Between Itanium and x86

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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users What Are the Differences Between Itanium and x86_64 CPUs? Post 302246918 by otheus on Tuesday 14th of October 2008 05:06:59 PM

10-14-2008

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As far as Hardware is concerned, I'm of the opinion that newer Opteron x86_64s will blow away Itanium servers. However, with Oracle -- and most non-CPU intensive tasks, the big problem is memory speed and latency. That's where it gets difficult to follow.

The early Opterons made a good move by putting the memory controller on the CPU itself. Although this was definitely superior, AMD was behind in moving their CPUs to support DDR2, wheras Intel had been doing that for years. Eventually, Intel moved the controller on the CPU (and the latest quad-core Itaniums do that) and AMD moved to support DDR2. I can tell you that DDR2 vs DDR1 is a pretty big difference. And benchmarks revealed that on-CPU memory controllers also made a big difference -- in certain applications.

Next we get to IO. Here, it matters little whether the chip is from Intel or AMD. Now it matters the quality of the chipset and hardware vendor. You need to have a very high FSB, and northbridge controllers. PCI-Express x16 and supporting cards should be preferred over PCI based controllers. Fiberchannel and Infiniband are preferred over SCSI, etc.

HP is supporting Linux with their HPC academic and blade-computing clusters. I don't know why you'd have to sacrifice HP support in order to get Linux. Could Linux outperform HP? Maybe not. Earlier, on this board, a poster demonstrated that HP-UX semaphore operations are 4x to 5x as fast as on Linux. Semaphores are pretty crucial when it comes to locking, and Oracle does that a lot. The only way to find out ... is to look for benchmarks that are similar to your environment.

otheus

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LEARN ABOUT LINUX

chcpu

CHCPU(8)                                                       System Administration                                                      CHCPU(8)

NAME

       chcpu - configure CPUs

SYNOPSIS

       chcpu -c|-d|-e|-g cpu-list
       chcpu -p mode
       chcpu -r|-h|-V

DESCRIPTION

       chcpu  can  modify  the state of CPUs.  It can enable or disable CPUs, scan for new CPUs, change the CPU dispatching mode of the underlying
       hypervisor, and request CPUs from the hypervisor (configure) or return CPUs to the hypervisor (deconfigure).

       Some options have a cpu-list argument.  Use this argument to specify a comma-separated list of CPUs.  The list can contain  individual  CPU
       addresses  or ranges of addresses.  For example, 0,5,7,9-11 makes the command applicable to the CPUs with the addresses 0, 5, 7, 9, 10, and
       11.

OPTIONS

       -c, --configure cpu-list
              Configure the specified CPUs.  Configuring a CPU means that the hypervisor takes a CPU from the CPU pool and assigns it to the  vir-
              tual hardware on which your kernel runs.

       -d, --disable cpu-list
              Disable the specified CPUs.  Disabling a CPU means that the kernel sets it offline.

       -e, --enable cpu-list
              Enable the specified CPUs.  Enabling a CPU means that the kernel sets it online.  A CPU must be configured, see -c, before it can be
              enabled.

       -g, --deconfigure cpu-list
              Deconfigure the specified CPUs.  Deconfiguring a CPU means that the hypervisor removes the CPU from the virtual  hardware  on  which
              the Linux instance runs and returns it to the CPU pool.  A CPU must be offline, see -d, before it can be deconfigured.

       -p, --dispatch mode
              Set  the  CPU  dispatching mode (polarization).  This option has an effect only if your hardware architecture and hypervisor support
              CPU polarization.  Available modes are:

                     horizontal  The workload is spread across all available CPUs.
                     vertical    The workload is concentrated on few CPUs.

       -r, --rescan
              Trigger a rescan of CPUs.  After a rescan, the Linux kernel recognizes the new CPUs.  Use this option on systems that do  not  auto-
              matically detect newly attached CPUs.

       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Display help text and exit.

RETURN CODES

       chcpu has the following return codes:

       0      success

       1      failure

       64     partial success

AUTHOR

       Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright IBM Corp. 2011

SEE ALSO

       lscpu(1)

AVAILABILITY

       The  chcpu  command  is  part  of the util-linux package and is available from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils
       /util-linux/>.

util-linux                                                           July 2014                                                            CHCPU(8)

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