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,
