Worth upgrading 165's to Phenom II's?

[Smalltimer]

I have been running a couple of 165 boards for rendering and data crunching which has worked quite well for the past least 2 years...

However, when I set it up, I concluded that the ideal upgrade would be migrating to 8 way processors. So now we have the Core i7(almost 8 core), but... this little voice inside says I should wait for 8 physical cores before making the jump.

So... AMD throws the PII out into the field and it looks very tempting! My take is if I can place a couple of Phenom II's under water I might actually double my mini-cluster performance which would be a significant leap in performance.

The question is... am I right in expecting Phenom II rigs to double my current performance or should I just wait for 8 true cores, or... settle on a Core i7?

PS. my current 165's are both running at 3Ghz.

[charged3800z24]

I have been running a couple of 165 boards for rendering and data crunching which has worked quite well for the past least 2 years...

However, when I set it up, I concluded that the ideal upgrade would be migrating to 8 way processors. So now we have the Core i7(almost 8 core), but... this little voice inside says I should wait for 8 physical cores before making the jump.

So... AMD throws the PII out into the field and it looks very tempting! My take is if I can place a couple of Phenom II's under water I might actually double my mini-cluster performance which would be a significant leap in performance.

The question is... am I right in expecting Phenom II rigs to double my current performance or should I just wait for 8 true cores, or... settle on a Core i7?

PS. my current 165's are both running at 3Ghz.

Well, the current Phenom's run a lot better @3.0ghz then the Opteron @ 3.oghz. I had a 165 also. I now have a 9950BE running 3.3ghz. The Phenom II is suppose to be a improvement over Phenom I clock for clock, And leaked info is suggesting this to be true. But Untill we see results that are official, it is not certain yet.

[iandh]

Well, the current Phenom's run a lot better @3.0ghz then the Opteron @ 3.oghz. I had a 165 also. I now have a 9950BE running 3.3ghz. The Phenom II is suppose to be a improvement over Phenom I clock for clock, And leaked info is suggesting this to be true. But Untill we see results that are official, it is not certain yet.

I don't really think that the question is whether there will be improvement; it is exactly how much the improvement will be. We'll know soon enough though anyways.

[biohead]

well you've got two more cores per machine and the IPC is a lot better over K8. That's potentially more than twice as fast, so I don't see why not.

[informal]

Roughly 25% better integer IPC and way way better than that SSE IPC(think ~80-100% faster per core),plus you get 2x the core count versus your K8 DC Opteron;power draw should be even lower than your Opty chip and temps should be lower too;last but not the least -OC margin is huge on Phenom II(Deneb) and sits around 3.8-4.2Ghz on air,a lot better than your opteron!
All in all you I'd say you will see substantial performance increase even if you don't OC Deneb.If you do,the increase will just jump another ~30% above what was said in regards IPC and core count.