Dual Core Or Dual CPU - What's the real difference in performance?

[Andrew Hammond]

On 2/7/07, Nicole Harrington <drumslayer2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Hello all,
>  I have been building/using servers that were dual CPU
> AMD Opteron systems for some time.  (usually 246
> Opteron cpu's)
>
>  Now of course the world is shifting to Dual Core.
>
> Using FreeBSD, what is really the difference, besides
> power and ability to shove in more memory, between
> having the two seperate CPUS's?

Well, you also have two additional HT buses for memory access. And one
additional HT bus for peripheral access although most motherboard
manufacturers don't actually do anything with it.

>  What if I did 2, Dual Core cpu's? Would the SMP
> overhead and sharing to a [Giant Locked] disk and or
> network erase any benefits?

Benefits to what? Your computer can idle quite effectively with a 386
processor while consuming less power, producing less heat and
requiring much less capital outlay than any Opteron box.

Or did you have a workload in mind? If that's the case then you might
want to tell us what it is, what analysis you've done on your current
system to figure out where the bottleneck is, and what your
performance goals for it are.

Andrew