Quote:
Originally Posted by midgetwaiter
Do you really think a quad core is worth the extra bucks for gaming? Most of the benchmarks I've seen give an edge to CPUs with bigger cache than number of cores as current games don't multi-thread well. I bet you'd get better results on a dual core with 6mb cache and using the money you save to get SLI video cards or at least a better single card.
Given that cluster you manage you probably have a much better understanding of threads than I do so I'm curious if you agree or not.
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Sorry to hijack the tread a bit. But the dual/quad question is always fun. Once upon a time the single cores were MUCH higher clock rate than the dual. Not so much anymore. Yes, games don't multi-thread that well yet, but most are getting better (most GPU's are 64/128 core). Anyways, usually it depends on the CPU. Intel's quads go through a single FSB and memory controller. Where on a server board with 16 memory slots and 2 AMD quad core. Each core is connected to 2 memory slots and interleaved. So, even though the DDR is 667, you are using all 16 in parrallel. SO the memory bandwidth is MUCH higher, and you need a NUMA aware OS to really get the best performance. With most games, the L1 cache size doens't matter that much anymore as they just are not big anough to hold anythign but tight looped code for the number of CPU's.
Of couse multi core is always better when you are running a massivly parrallel program spread across a cluster (interconnects are the slow part not the CPU's) so 100 quad cores is a lot faster than 400 singles (less interconnects and less switch hops)
I am also working to bring online another 4000 or so CPU's in the next few weeks.
that should be enough for now.