[MITgcm-support] AMD opteron versus XEON

[Yosef Ashkenazy]

Hi All,

I know that this issue was discussed several times in the past. Yet, we couldn't make up our minds based on these old posts. We are about to buy a small cluster (about 4-5 nodes) that will be mainly used for WRF and MITgcm computations. The question is the cost/benefit ratio--do the more expensive Xeon processors perform much better than the cheaper AMD processors? We are thinking about the AMD 6200 series processors (4 CPUs per node, each cpu has 16 cores) versus the xeon 5670 (or xeon E5-2660) processors or similar. Did anyone run a benchmark to compare such two configurations?
For the same price we can get many more AMD cores. However, we are not sure whether the performance per core in the AMD is the same as the performance per core in the Xeon. 
Any recommendations?

Yours,

Yossi