On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 15:21 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 09:30:57PM +0200, Robert Cates wrote: > > michael wrote: > >> On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 22:02 +0200, Robert Cates wrote: > >> > >>> Hi all, > >>> > >>> just a general question - I'm interested in getting a motherboard that > >>> supports 4 of the new AMD Quad Core CPUs. That would be effectively 16 > >>> CPUs. My question is, with the 2.6.18-5-686 kernel from etch, will the > >>> SMP kernel work with all 16 cores? What is actually the current limit of > >>> cores (CPUs) that the 2.6.18 (or newer) kernel will support? > >>> > >> > >> don't expect things to go 16x faster > >> > >> > >> > > Ok, but 16x better? Or 16x more efficient? I know that if we're talking > > about a 2GHz quad core CPU we're not getting 8GHz of speed, but what > > exactly is the (performance) advantage of SMP? > > > > how about 16x more parallel? at least to the extent that your workload > is able to parallelize (is that a word?). IOW, if you have lots of > tasks running independently of each other and/or you have tasks > running code that can take advantage of parallel processing, then > those things that fit that criterion will run in parallel. And those > tasks will then complete faster because they have more cpu time than > they would get in a system with fewer cpus. > > At least that's how it seems to me.
current multicore also shares (L2?) cache so there's contention there too which will severely affect codes that require data to work on... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
