dual vs single core opteron 100's

[Ken Gunderson]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:09:22 +0100
Lars Tunkrans <lars.tunkrans at bredband.net> wrote:

> Ken Gunderson wrote:
> 
> >Greets Everyone:
> >
> >I was getting into a discussion the other day about this and decided to
> >see what the FBSD amd64 gurus had to say about it.  Given approximately
> >equal cost of, for example, a single core Opteron150 (2.4GHz) and a
> >dual core Opteron165 (1.8GHz) under what kind of situations would
> >one be preferred over the other?  
> >
> >fwiw- my friend asserts it will ALWAYS be the faster single core because
> >of context switches and dual cores are optimized for highly multi-
> >threaded OS's (e.g. WInblows). But 1) I think the scheduler has been
> >improved in 6.0, and 2) he's a linuxer.
> >
> >And yes, I know what AMD has to say on this but am interested in the
> >FBSD community's perspective on this w.r.t. FBSD.
> >
> >TIA
> >
> >  
> >
> The DUAL core will be prefferd  for Webservers, Application servers,   
> and databases
> that  are multithreaded  and transaction oriented.

That was his point- precious few of these exist in FOSS, e.g. X,
anything Python based, etc.  I thought, even so, the dual cores will
benefit at higher concurrency (just not quite as good a dual CPU).
Then enter his comment that "context switching on FBSD sucks..
Blah, blah, blah..."

Moreover, he's more of a workstation than server dude and in this
respect the faster single core may have an edge.  But extending his
ALWAYS to include servers I think he's over stepping.

> The singel Core  will be preffered for Simulations,  Compute intensive 
> stuff - image  Rendering ,
> Games , that are  singel threaded.



-- 
Best regards,

Ken Gunderson

Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
A: Why is putting a reply at the top of the message frowned upon?