itanium or pentium-IV for linux

[Faysal_1]

i m not a techie. i just want to know which intel processor best suite for linux operating system itanium or pentium-IV ?

i even dont know the diff between the two processors.

thnx

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Depends what you will be doing.

In general, newer and faster does the job.

Itanium is a 64 bit processor, more expensive, more powerful, designed for servers.

Pentium IV is a 32 bit processor(pretty sure), less powerful and versatile, more designed for the end user.

I've got a bunch of Linux servers running various Pentium/Celeron processors without any problems or issues at all.

SEP

[Faysal_1]

God Allah Bless You, Mr. Steven E Proter.
thnx

[dirk dierickx]

it all depends on the task indeed. X86 is great for general stuff, stand alone computing, internet services etc.

if you are going to build a computational cluster or write some application that benefits greatly from floating point calculations you might do well with an itanium cpu based machine.

in case you are looking for 64bit linux, you could go for amd64 as well.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

in fact, new Intel's CPUs support "EMT64" - 64-bit memory extension, see for details:

http://developer.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/faq.htm

http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~schoene/unter_texte/texte/amd64_znsem.pdf

[Thomas Bianco]

we have both Pentium 4 Xeon and Itanium servers. the only itaniums are engineering servers with VERY heavy processing load (simulations, etc...). we're considering ditching the itanium, because of the astronomical price point. for the cost of one DP Itanium box, we can order 9 DP Xeon servers.

currently, the only reason to use itanium is if you need the 64bit processing and raw compute power. if you server is doing anything but number crunching, you'll probably get better performance for P4 xeon

[rick jones]

Thomas - IIRC there have been some reasonably recent changes in HP's Itanium server pricing that happened with the recent system announcements. I cannot say that it makes an Itanium box as cheap as a Pentium one, but I suspect it will somewhat close the gap.

Itanium boxes tend to have more bus bandwidth. You may have fewer MP scaling issues as a result.

When you decide to go with Itanium, some performance tools that may help you achieve even higher performance would include Caliper (http://www.hp.com/go/caliper) and the q-tools - q-syscollect which is from HP Labs. I do not recall the URL off hand, but a search on q-tools should get you there.

Itanium seems to do rather well on crypto.