Hi all,

Have any of you benchmarked CFX on Intel's brand new Woodcrest server CPUs?

All non-CFD benchmarks I've seen indicate it will annihilate AMD's Opterons *and* be a good deal cheaper

I'd be gratefull of any of you can you provide me with some hard data as I would like to upgrade of current Opteron cluster ASAP.

No benchmark data, but I would recommend waiting for some before going out and buying a new Woodcrest machine. I've seen a few non-CFD benchmarks that show Woodcrest is a fair bit better that Opteron, but these tend to be multi-media or rendering benchmarks. The CFX Solver uses a lot of memory bandwidth and memory latency is important too. In the one benchmark I've seen that compares memory latency, the Opteron came out better than the Woodcrest since Opteron's Hypertransport is still better than the Woodcrest solution. The Woodcrest is still going through the FSB, but they have a dedicated FSB for each core now, so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. I guess we'll just have to wait for some benchmark data. Hopefully it's faster than the Opteron, and hopefully AMD come back with something faster... competition is good! Mike

Woodcrest has more memory bandwidth than the Opterons in a 2 CPU config.

(Of course anything > 2 necessarily requires the Opteron's cHT links for decent performance.)