HP and AMD: Multicore to the Max

摘要

The multicore rush is on, and what a race it's going to be if the performance of Hewlett-Packard's DL 585 server with four 64-bit AMD Opteron 880 dual-core processors is any indication. I installed the beefy 4U server in our Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs~® for testing. The 2.4-GHz CPUs run 64-bit Windows Server 2003 on 16 GB of RAM and 138 GB of SCSI disk managed by HP's Disk Array management system, 4-Gbps NICs, and a PCI-X bus. The server has six free PCI-X slots—expansion space that's increasingly lacking in servers—for peripheral cards.