Philip Wen's //

Core vs Phenom II virtualization showdown

With the wounds from competitive price cuts still fresh, I decided to make some small deposits into the pockets of both Intel and AMD.  I picked up the Core i7 920 chip as well as the AMD Phenom II 940 CPU/Asus board combo from Fry’s about a week ago, and recently picked up an Asus P6T Deluxe from a friend who works at Newegg.

The consensus online seems to be that the Phenom 940 offers slightly more performance per dollar, while the Bloomfield is capable of providing the higher performance if budget is less of a concern.

Well, I am giving it a tally for the parts of the both systems, and will be butt-benching the both systems using Hyper-V and seeing which system offers better bang for the buck in terms of VM’s performance.

Thus far,

The Core machine’s cost:

Core i7 920 – $219
Asus P6T Deluxe – $220
Patriot 4GB DDR3 – $90 – $25 Rebate = $65
——————————————————-
Intel Total = $504

The Phenom II machine’s cost:

AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition – $203
Asus M3N78 Pro – $96
Corsair DDR2 4GB – $50 – $30 rebate = $20
——————————————————-
AMD Total = $320

The rest of the components will be identical between the two systems, so I’ve left them out of consideration.

Once I am able to get these systems thrown together and get some VMs on, I will report back.

In the meantime, have any of you done this already, and what are your thoughts on either/both systems?

New Core i7 logos

Don’t you just LOOOOVE Moore’s Law? When Q6600 was first introduced, it was going for slightly more than $300. Now? You can get a Nehalem Core-i7 920 for $288 shipped from here.  Couple the chip with one of these boards and you’ve got yourself an awesome box to run quite a few VMs!

What will really knock the bang-for-buck out of the ballpark will be the 24GB RAM.  This won’t be cheap of course.

I still feel that a Q9300 with a good P45 board is still the way to go for budget Virtualization for now.  It will get real interesting though, if those DDR3 chips start coming down in price.

Until then, I will just keep dreaming about replacing a rack of 4U servers with one of these boxes

Intelś upcoming Nehalem platform

So Intel is releasing Nehalem finally.  After reading Tomś article, here are some thoughts.

1.  It is disappointing that Intel has purposely crippled overclocking on the new platform.  This will probably cause the enthusiasts/fan crowd to stick with the older platform in the near term.  Even though the i7 920 is reasonably priced, the platform will still be much more expensive than a Yorkfield based system– especially an overclocked Yorkfield.  Value proposition is not quite there for adoption… yet.

2. Until DDR3 and the X58 platform comes down in price, Intel won´t be pushing too many of these.  I do see the release of Nehalem as a prime opportunity for the volume pushers like Dell and HP to start blowing out Yorkfield based systems at bargain prices however, so those would be my recommended systems to pick up for probably the next 2 – 3 quarters (with coupons, of course).

3. Since power consumption is roughly on par with the current Yorkfield platform, and most benchmarks only show a slight performance improvement (Yes, I consider 25% slight compared to the 60-70% that simple overclocking can provide), replacement of current VM farms based on the i7 architecture will not be economically feasible until probably the next iteration of the Nehalem architecture.  Perhaps with the release with Westmere and Sandy Bridge we will be able to see some affordable Nehalem systems.

4. Prices levels have NOT been sticky enough however, so perhaps another year is all it will take.  Provided AMD can still stay in the game with Shanghai, we may see price levels adjusting quickly yet.  AMD has managed to provide decent competition even with an outdated lineup (albeit burning cash along the way), so hereś to hoping that they will last a bit longer.

What are your thoughts on Nehalem?

Post below, or use the following forum to voice your opinion.

Update:  This review also seems to mirror my opinion.  Great performer, but early adopter tax makes it not worthwhile… yet.

Update 2:  Tom’s released an update article to the initial mentioned above.  It looks as if I may have jumped the guns on the above conclusion.  If boards are able to provide a soft switch for the feature, then then 920 may not be a bad investment after all, even at the initial prices.  I will post an update on this topic after I am able to get my hands on a retail package.