On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 at 2:00pm, Chris Mauritz wrote
Has anyone here benchmarked 64-bit 4.2 against a dual core opteron (or Athlon 64x2) vs a pair of physical single-core opterons? It's that time of year again....ordering new workstations. 8-)
It's not exactly what you asked for, but have a look at http://www.duke.edu/~jlb17/dualcore.pdf. I benchmarked LS-DYNA and matlab on a dual core Opteron based system running 4.1. For each test, I ran 1, then 2, then 4 identical jobs.
The bottom line (as always) is that the "right" choice depends on what you intend to run. Codes that are CPU bound (like the structural sims in the above benchmarks) scale almost linearly on dual cores, while codes that are memory intensive (like the thermal sim) do see some reduction in efficiency due to the shared memory controller. Based on my results, I went with dual cores, as thermal sims are in the minority of what we run.