🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 05 Jan 2003 18:50:54 GMT, George Bell <MasterofTimeADim@netscape.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm actually on your side, but for different reasons.  I doubt a dual 
> processor machine brings much advantage *unless* you are in a situation 
> where you need lots of processing power - and some of the posters bear 
> out with their testimonies the superior performance of dual processor 
> systems.  I think dual processor system gives a noticable difference if 
> you a) have a lot of users logged on at once b) run a busy webserver 
> that has to spawn a whole lot of connections at once c) you tend to run 
> lots of applications at once.  At what point this advantage becomes 
> apparent - I'm not sure....

One situation where dual cpus are an advantage for a desktop PC is if you
often have a long running cpu intensive program running in the background. 
With a dual cpu system you don't even know you have anything else running
but on a single cpu box the loss of responsiveness is noticeable (even if
the background process is reniced).

> The problems you mention I think are pretty well addressed by dedicated 
> circuitry in the cpu when it is in SMP mode and advanced algorithms.  I 
> am no expert on this so perhaps someone else can contribute to this 
> thread, but this is why I have found that some CPUs can operate in SMP 
> while others cannot.  Until up to a few years ago I think AMD didn't 
> even make processors that could work in SMP - only Intel.

Some earlier AMD cpus supported something similar to SMP (I forget what it
was called) but no motherboard ever supported it.  AFAIK this was more of a
patent issue than a technological one.

-- 
Ray