Author: Aaron Gordon
Date: 12:31:04 04/10/03
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On April 10, 2003 at 13:25:21, Jonas Bylund wrote: >Personally i have seen a great difference in the long run between SMP capable >chess engines and single processor engines, in the words of someone who have >dealt with both, what would you say are the pro's and con's?? > >Jonas While messing with SMP machines is a bit of fun, I still prefer single cpu machines. I've noticed the bandwidth on all x86 SMP machines are pretty horrid compared to fast single cpu systems. Dual Xeon 2.8GHz gets about 2.5GB/s, my single AthlonXP system is pulling about 3.5gb/s. Not to mention the latency is pretty nasty with SMP machines. Also, there the overclockability factor. Single cpu machines tend to overclock much more and cost much less. Plus with a fast single cpu machine you get good performance all around, not in just the select few applications that support SMP. As far as applications go, I'm sure there are more to come.. but for RIGHT NOW, if you get an smp machine are you going to wait 2 years before there are enough SMP applications to make it worth while? By then you'll want another upgrade and would have wasted the SMP systems capabilities, and by then it would probably just get thrown in the closet or get turned into a router. I'm happy knowing my 2.5GHz XP gets 1gb/s more memory bandwidth than a dual Xeon system, and faster performance than a dual Xeon 2.4GHz in chess and about equal speeds with a P4-3.06 @ 4GHz. Not bad for an $80 cpu, $80 motherboard, $150 of ram, etc.. I know SMP does have it's advantages, of course. I use a dual Celeron 400@550 in my server, it comes in pretty handy (plus it's just fun to mess with). IMHO if you're not doing strenuous tasks like massive webserver stuff, multiple game servers handling hundreds (or thousands) of people, cpu intensive database manipulation, etc, then it'd be a waste of money. For desktop stuff, playing games & whatnot, my vote is for a single cpu box. :)
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