On Friday 08 April 2005 05:17, p k wrote: > Apparently, Dual Core Opterons have a release date of April 21. > > Will there be any advantage for prime95 with dual core?
We've had SMP motherboards for ages - I used to have one running two PII-350s and I still have one running two PIII-1000s. Dual core CPUs are effectively the same but with the two CPUs in a single package (convenient) and wearing a single heatsink (convenient, but could represent a bottleneck in dumping waste heat). The other downside to integrated multiple CPU packages is that you don't get the marketing option of selling a system on the basis that you can add a second CPU later if you need it. Actually this is not much of a downside given the extremely high churn rate of CPU supply. How much advantage you get depends on whether the bottleneck is CPU execution units or memory bandwidth - two CPUs can obviously make bigger demands on the memory subsystem than a single CPU running at the same speed. For this reason, my experience with dual processor systems is that the best throughput is invariably obtained with one CPU running LL testing and the other running trial factoring. Two CPUs running LL testing in parallel will overload the memory bus and interfere with each other, though the effect will still be better than trying to run two LL tests on a single CPU hyperthread enabled system. BTW there was a report in the Register this week on a dual Pentium 4 evaluation system supplied by Intel - not retail ready but not that far off. Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
