6/17 For general purpose computing do you think a dual p3-700 with 100mhz
bus is faster than a single p3-700 with 133 mhz bus? When would the
single cpu be faster?
\_ For most applications, the bus speed will not matter. So you
are looking at 1 CPU versus 2 CPUs. You may not receive any
benefit to 2 CPUs, but they will not hurt. So the dual is
almost always going to be faster. The exception is if you are
limited by the bus speed (lots of I/O) and even then 133 is not
much faster than 100.
\_ Bus speed helps for applications that access memory in large
"stride". Having an extra CPU and not using it at all will actually
slow the system down by 1-2% due to extra polling.
\_ No, because the CPU will be used by the OS. Real benchmarks
I have run show about a 10% gain on 2 CPUs even if there is just
one non-threaded process running. The other CPU will never
be 100% idle.
\_ Sorry, I was refering to OSes which are not dual-cpu aware.
\_ From op: I'll be using windows XP. Thanks. |