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.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
