DF on Opterons?

[Tesela Tinniber]

Brian or others: How well do you think DF will run on the new Opterons? Are there any plans to make an amd64 client?

I *might* set up a dual Opteron workstation soon and if that goes through I could give you remote access for testing/compiling/whatever if access to an amd64 box is a limiting factor.

Regards,
TT.

[Brian the Fist]

We may be getting such a box soon, so we'll see..

[AMDPHREAK]

This is from someone without any 64 bit experience, so keep that in mind as I talk theory...

I don't know how much the DF client would benefit from 64bit precision in calculations, but the Opteron's integrated memory controller combined with a fast chipset/memory could easily make up for the lower overall clock speed. (it has in most benchmarks used by the PC community)

I know that Seti@home looked at x86-64 compilation for their client and discovered little or no benefit to making a special compiling. DF works quite differently and so may be able to benefit from certain optimizations, or it may work very fast compiled the way it is. AMD has put a LOT of effort into their 32bit performance, so I wouldn't be surprised...

But with the 2.0GHz just introduced at a fairly high price, and the chipset choices still slim, it is going to be awhile before there is a large enough user base to make it worth the effort. Until then, the current 32bit version should be almost as fast as a specially compiled version IMHO.