AMD Opteron 6276 2.30GHz 16 core 115 watt can be had for £30 each but the Super Micro H8QGi board is still pricey at £700

@ Thargor - Idon't envy you moving house, I moved last year and found it very frustrating at times as opposed to just frustrating for most of the time. Made me annoyed at times that meant having to send a few blunt emails to the solicitors involved. Hope your move goes smoothly.

@ reduk - that's some sofa you've got. You look down the back of it and find 40 cores, I do the same and find dust and fluff.


Reading back through the posts about having a forum for the team. I don't use FB so that one is out for me but I certainly won't try to stop people using it. The main thing for me is if there was a a team forum away from here then I think a presence would still need to be made here as I would imagine that a number of team members have joined the team because of seeing us on the Team forum section. Would we be stretching ourselves a bit with both forums?

Nice walk along the Thames estuary today with some nice food and wine thrown in (to me not the estuary!) bit knackered now though.

@Reduk, I've never really looked at Opterons before, they are quite juicy still at 115w each but that's a lot of performance for the money!

Here's another way to skin that cat (16 physical cores but 32 including HT), need to buy 2 of course to hit the 64threads but it's a good price.
Dual E5-2650 32gb with PSU £250
Equipped with super loud 1U fans so it'll need re-housing in a workstation (I'd guess E-ATX or SSI EEB form factor) and some suitable heat-sinks applied, the existing ones are crazy, one is actually lined up to block the airflow to the other, I'm hoping it was just assembled like that for the photo. More or less useless for a daily workstation due to limited Graphics/ PCI but could be great for CPU crunching. I'm going to keep looking for the low wattage many core unicorn though. :D

@Genhos, yeah hosting a forum elsewhere may reduce people stumbling across us as you say but the way I found it a couple of months back was a search for teams in the UK and then this forum via the 'Click Here To Visit Team Home Page' link on our team homepage - so in my case it wouldn't have mattered but perhaps others experiences were different.

cheers,

Morning All..

@mic1, I've never been convinced about hyperthreading but I also didn't realise how much better the Intel's were at floating point calculations than AMD's until I found this site: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cfp2006.html

The comparison below is between a 32 core AMD Opteron and a 16 core Intel for floating point operations and whilst it not exactly the same Intel processor as in the foxcon, the result difference is staggering.

Supermicro A+ Server 1022G-NTF AMD Opteron 6276 32 core
Base 35.6 Peak 43.6

IBM System x3500 M4 (Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2, 2.60 GHz) 16 core
Base 92.0 Peak 96.2

You can also buy the foxcon for 214.99 inc shipping here:

http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/cheap-e5-260...erver-configure-to-order/

I've ordered one so will let you know how it performs

@mac1, the full length rails make life much easier for me so that was a bonus, I did consider the 2670 2.6ghz option but that doubles the price and I think I'd rather spend the same amount on 2 nodes.