Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Are three cores better than two?

Posted by Hemos on

Barbarian writes "That's the question that Tom's Hardware asked. They took a dual-cpu motherboard and stuck both a single and a dual core Opteron on the board, for a total of three cores. Does it work? Well, yes, when it's not crashing. It does raise the possibility of tri-core processors whilst we are waiting for the next die shrink."

4 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. The Conclusion... by MrRogers2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Pages are loading pretty slow, here's the conclusion for those who don't want to wait:
    As you could see, the fact that we used two rather different Opterons for putting together the triple core system had an impact on the benchmark results that was hard to predict. Performance depends on the level of a program's thread-optimization, but we also had a hard time with some particular benchmarks. Some did not work at all (AutoGK w/ DivX or Xvid, Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus). For others, performance was worse than that offered by a dual-core Opteron 275 configuration (such as with memory benchmarks, ScienceMark, WinRAR file compression and Windows Media Encoder). However, the majority of software we used was able to scale well thanks to the third core (which was the case with Cinebench 2003, PovRay 3.7, Cinema 4D R9 and 3DS Max 7).

    --
    MrRogers(2)
  2. Why have symmetric cores? by Demon-Xanth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why not setup one core heavily interger optimized, and one floating point? That way you can run the FP apps like rockets, and the interger apps like lightning w/o comprimizing on either. Rather than have a long chain in the pipeline you could have paralell paths, and once an instruction is set down one path, the CPU could take the next and see if it can stick it down another path.

    --
    If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
  3. Re:Are three tires better than four? by pclminion · · Score: 4, Informative
    Yes it works when it's design to work, like the XBox 360. SMP stands for SYMETRICAL MULTIPROCESSOR. A dual core and a single core are not symetrical

    Symmetrical multiprocessing refers to the equality of each CPU in terms of running jobs. Each core has equal opportunity to schedule and execute a thread. The fact that the individual CPUs are different has nothing to do with it.

    But thanks for playing the Demonstrate Your Ignorance Of Terminology game.

  4. Just one small problem.... by NerveGas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Opteron systems aren't SMP. They're NUMA.

    In theory, the ability to run to chips of different speeds was there even in the Athlon MP, as it had independant busses from the morthbridge. In practice, it didn't work very well, either.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.