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Thread: Benefits from having more than one processor?

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    Benefits from having more than one processor?

    was just looking at the Thunder K8QS mobo, is having more than one processor gonna effect performance greatly or is this favoured more towards servers?



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    Cable Guy Jonny M's Avatar
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    Depends what you want.

    If you're video editing and encoding, or 3D rendering, then go for it.

    If you don't know what you want dual CPUs for, you don't need them.

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Dual CPU's are something I've wanted to dabble in, but haven't got round to.

    Basically they're great for CPU heavy multitasking, and programs will be more responsive if you run several at once. However, most programs can't use two CPU's, so they'll only run as fast the single CPU. This is true for just about every game that's out there, except Quake III I think.
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    Thats that then! lol

    i used to encode loads of .avi's but not much more.
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    I like the idea of dual core AMD 64bit CPUs that are projected as coming sometime next year
    That should be interesting.

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by turkster
    I like the idea of dual core AMD 64bit CPUs that are projected as coming sometime next year
    That should be interesting.
    Yeah it will be interesting to see how they implement that.
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    With multiple CPU's can you not tell a program to run on a certain CPU? or does it not work like that?

    Always fancied having one, but dont have the money or the justification (apart from general interest) to have a go. They are really for servers though. Im sure you can get Super computers that have crazy amounts of CPU's like 16 or 32. You can get motherboards that can take 4 CPU's on home user stores.

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blockers
    With multiple CPU's can you not tell a program to run on a certain CPU? or does it not work like that?

    Always fancied having one, but dont have the money or the justification (apart from general interest) to have a go. They are really for servers though. Im sure you can get Super computers that have crazy amounts of CPU's like 16 or 32. You can get motherboards that can take 4 CPU's on home user stores.

    mmm...4 x P4 3.06ghz HT.
    Yes they can be told what processor affinity to have, doesn't make them use both if they don't support it though.

    32 CPU's is NOTHING for a super computer, that's just a high end datacenter server.

    You can get quad CPU workstations for hefty stuff like CAD and video work - saw a neat quad AMD64 job at CTS2004.
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    Dual or quad processors are absolutely nothing in comparison to super-computers. The most powerful super-computer in the world at the moment is the Earth Simulator in Japan which has 5120 processors. The Top 500 list shows the top 500 supercomputers in the world at the moment. It is well worth a look. Note the 44th a 48th most powerful are owned by WETA digital and each contain over a thousand 2.8GHZ Zeons. These were used to generate the CGI for LOTR.
    Thats serious computing power .

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    The main advantage on systems i've used is with muti-processor
    set-ups is you can still maintain a responsive operating enviroment
    without any heavy CPU tasking app bringing the system to a near
    griding holt.

    You tell the app to use e.g. CPU 2 and assign that a high CPU priority
    for maximum performance, the operating system maintains its presence
    as such on CPU 1 and you can carry on doing what you want without the
    performance hit if it were to be all running on the same CPU.

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    i read somewhere that the engine behind doom iii can utilize multiple processors. also with dual-core processors coming out soon and perhaps making it into the mainstream, multiprocessing could become standard.



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