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,