Author: P. Massie
Date: 19:07:12 02/20/03
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On February 20, 2003 at 20:06:01, Robert Pawlak wrote: >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 I have a dual Xeon (2 Ghz) running Win 2000. My machine is more than a year old, so well before HT was available. I frequently use it for an application similar to yours, where I have something running in the background that completely ties up one processor and a large chunk of memory. I can still use the machine quite normally for other jobs - there's no discernible slowdown, either visually or through benchmarking while this is going on. The caveats here are that the background job can't be doing any I/O, and it has to leave a reasonable amount of memory available for your foreground jobs. Given that is the case, my experience with a dual Xeon is that it works beautifully for this. You're still sharing a single I/O and memory system, so if the background job starts doing I/O at the same time as the foreground job, or if it takes too much memory you'll still have an overall slowdown. I'm not an expert on HT, but based on what I've read about it, and what I know about how computers work I suspect it will be somewhat better than a "normal" processor for this, but not nearly as good as a true dual. My suggestion would be a dual AMD or Xeon. Paul
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