[CentOS] amd64 benchmarks

Wed Dec 28 12:56:38 UTC 2005
Chris Mauritz <chrism at imntv.com>

Chris Mauritz wrote:

> Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
>
> Thanks!  That is extremely helpful.  These machines are primarily 
> going to be used for encoding streaming media, raytracing animations, 
> and hacking up and applying filters to uncompressed video.  Both tasks 
> tend to be mostly cpu bound on our current workstations.  It's 
> becoming rather cheap to build a quad-core system with the new Opteron 
> 180 dual core parts.  A couple of years ago, you couldn't even dream 
> of doing this stuff in a timely manner without a room full of SGI 
> Octanes or equivalent.



Ooops, that should  be Opteron 280.  8-)

Cheers,