Kam Salisbury on Sun, 8 Jun 2003 13:43:08 -0400 |
I would like to add that AFTER you install an (Symetric Multi Processor) SMP kernel you can easily "set afinity" (though I cannot remember how to actuall force afinity of a process to one processor or the other under Linux right now) for a process or just let Linux do it automatically for you. I used to run an old PIII dual board and saw more stability (fewer lag issues, timeouts, etc. when the first CPU was very busy)when I had the box doing many different things at once. I would not have a dual processor box again unless I needed to run a busy LAMP box that was also my workstation. Simply because in te SOHO environment, my old HP PII333 workstation is way more than I need for a home server. (Truth be told, I would rather even have a NAS unit but why bother until the workstatoin dies.) If your box is only going to be a workstation and not a server that sees some use as well (mine was the server for my house as well as my workstation) then a single processor will do fine. RAM in my opinion will always be a key issue for single processor systems since you can always change your RAM compliment easily (to a point) but not your system bus speed without a motherboard and possible processor and Ram type change. Kam Salisbury http://kamsalisbury.com > -----Original Message----- > From: plug-admin@lists.phillylinux.org > [mailto:plug-admin@lists.phillylinux.org] On Behalf Of mike.h > Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 12:51 PM > To: plug > Subject: Re: [PLUG] Hardware question > > > On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 11:02, Beldon Dominello wrote: > > > I have a chance to buy a pretty solid dual PII 1GHz > workstation that > > > I intend > <snip> > > On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 11:49, Kevin Brosius wrote: > > That's a good question... Generally, the consensus seems > to be that > > 1-1, a single CPU box has more overall horsepower. So in > your case, a > > single 2Ghz box is generally more powerful than a dual 1Ghz > box. But > > that's a simple generalization. The first question to ask > is, do any > > of your sound editing tools support multi-threading? If > not, then I'd > > go for the single cpu box. > > <snip> > > unless you were sure that the apps you want to use support > > multi-threading. > <snip> > > Note: Multi-treading and multi-processing are NOT the same > thing. To get any use of dual processors, your kernel must be > built for it. Out of the box Linux distros are not, so you'll > have to compile a kernel. Application support for > multi-threading will not make a difference in and of itself. > > In other respects, I'd tend to agree with Kevin: front side > bus speed could be more important than number of processors, > especially if your apps are i/o bound rather than cpu bound. > > -- > -mike.h > _________________ > mike.h@acm.org > mike.h@stemik.com > __________________________________________ > Democracy is the worst form of government; > except for all those other forms that have > been tried from time to time. > > -Winston Churchill > __________________________________________ > GnuPG public key: > http://www.stemik.com/~mike.h/mike.h.asc > > _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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