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Subject: Hyperthreading vs. dual configuration performance? Somewhat OT

Author: Robert Pawlak

Date: 17:06:01 02/20/03


Hi Everyone,

I am on the verge of buying a new computer at work. However, I do quite a bit of
heavy computation, and have a need to run modeling jobs that take days to
complete. My current system gets a bit sluggish when I do this, and so I have
been thinking about one of the following:

Dual Xeon
Dual Athlon MP
3 GHz P4 with HT
OS: WinXP

The software I run in the background is very integer intensive. The are times
also when I run floating point intensive stuff as well. And of course, the
models consume gobs of memory. So you see the similarities to your typical chess
engine with large hash (at least for integer stuff).

The application I am using will only run in a single thread. My concern is not
so much about MIPS, but about whether the machine is still usable while my jobs
are running in the background.

Base on my limited understanding of hyperthreading, it looks like it might be an
ok alternative. But I have no idea how well it will perform for my needs. I
included it because it has the potential to be the best performer. The dual Xeon
seems interesting to me as well, since it would give me four logical processors
:-). I also think Intel might be my better choice because of the larger memory
bandwidth.

Does anyone have any practical experience they'd like to share on this topic?

Thanks,
Bob



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