Am 20 Oct 2004 20:47 meinte Zane H. Healy: Define true and kludge. One could argue the Opteron is a tru 64 Bit while the PA is a kuldge .. *G* Serious, it's the old game what is an n-bit CPU - is a 68008 an 8 Bit CPU, a 16 or a 32 Bit one? If it's the buswidth, then a Pentium is already a 64 Bit CPU... is it the (work) register width, then it's 32, and looking at the typical instruction encodeing, it's 16 Bit ... Oh, and don't forget the ALU size (another problem, which ALU to choose, since modern CPUs have usualy several)... If you're looking at the AMD64 vs. PA Ric, I can't see any relevant difference. Both are working with 8, 16, 32 and 64 Bit integers on a regular base, both have an opcodescheme that is optimized for the most common (or at least most common as the designers see it) data types (8, 32 and 64), and both can perform the usual every day tasks of a general purpose CPU without minding any special quirks. Performancewise (as the original question was), SPEC95 is usualy an acceptable measure. See here for data from 99 http://www.heise.de/ix/benchmarks/SPEC/rh9909/rh9909_5.html Not realy new, but a quite nice look at SPEC http://www.heise.de/ix/benchmarks/SPEC/rh9909/default.html SPEC is also the first place you should look if you want to compare CPUs performancewise. But they publish the latest results (go on CPU/ CPU2000/Pusblished or for the older to http://www.specbench.org/cpu95/results/ ) I GHz AMD Athlons had rates arround 45 here, so when just calculateing the PA-Result linear, we come to the same region... now, the AMD64 seams to be roughly 3-4 times as fast as the old 1 GHz Atlon at the same clock level ... so get your fugures here. Performancewise I think the Opteron is top notch at the moment. And personaly, I don't care what bit pattern initiates a certain operation in my Server, as long as the price/performance ratio is as good as possible - also a reason why I'm now switching to mini-ITX boards as workstations. Not realy fast, but nice all in one, for a real low price. And as usual YMMV - means, it realy depends on your task. Isn't that the big number game between AMD and Intel? Just look what kind of 'real world' example Intel uses to show their advantage. The P4 has a rather long pipeline, which allows high speeds when goin thru predictable sequences (and a big malus then not), so for jobs like MP3 or Video encodeing here raher long, FPU intense and often repeated sequences on linear datasets are to be performed, it oursuns AMDs Athlon by sheere MHz and is only limited by the bus bandwith for data (that's why Intel did realy soup up the bus over the last versions). Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/

I apologize profusely... my brain was attled. The comparison I was looking for was between the Itanium and the Opteron. Sorry :\ Jay