Initial impressions of Socket F/1207 machine

We have a machine we are building in the lab now. I am running all sorts of code on it. My impressions?

It is a somewhat better Opteron than Opteron. The tests I have run to date indicate that the 2.6 GHz unit is on par with, if not slightly faster than the Woodcrest 2.66 GHz unit. This is mostly heavy computational code: GAMESS runs, a weather code for a customer, and others. Will work on informatics codes next. All in all the processor race appears to be quite interesting now. Hopefully someone will loan us a quad core so we can take it around the block several times. I am concerned about resource contention with quad cores, much more so than I was with dual cores. Measurements on the dual core performance indicated small contention effects. I don’t know if quad will be different, though I do expect them to be more pronounced and have a heavier impact.