Simply put, American engineers excel at creativity. Indeed, when you consider the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century as reported on the National Academy of Engineering website - innovations such as human flight, refrigeration, electrification, the telephone, automobiles, television, computers, space travel and the Internet - you see that almost all of them were either invented by Americans, or had some crucial American link that helped turn a fledgling technology into a major boon for human kind."
Now a MP 2600+ (the fastest I can find) it's 300 euro.I think the price of the Opteron 240 was around 400 euro, 3 months ago.
So I think that now the performance/price ratio should be slightly higher for the Opteron... and it just can get bigger in the future.
I'm looking forward to my next 4/8 processor Opteron machine!
I'm using a dual Opteron (model 240, 1.4 GHz) for intensive scientific calculations.
Our program, on the Opteron system, works 1.5 to 2 times faster than the 32 bit version that runs on a double Athlon MP 1800+ (1.533 GHz), depending on the algorithm.
why SMP nowadays?
If I was doing stuff for school / research, Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, Spice (ok not 100% sure on spice) are all single processor only.
Well, I'm doing programs for research, in biomagnetism field. We have to display up to 1.5 GB of data (in different ways: magnetic map display, channel display, frequency spectrum display) and make different kind of math analysis on them. The programs need to be as fast as possible (faster programs mean more subjects analyzed a day), so we write our own C++ code (using a couple of math libraries too) in a multithreaded fashion. Depending on the algorithm the speed gain ranges between 1.2/1.8 times the single processor version. In our work SMP isn't just useful, is necessary!
And don't forget that if you write a multithreaded algorithm in a good way, it'll be scalable to N processors just changing a variable. It means that if in the future we'll have cheap machines with 4 processors we'll just have to change some #defines and get double the speed.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you do with a GPL scientific paper -- change some things and put your own name on it?
Look, that's what actually happens to 50% of the current scientific publications...
Simply put, American engineers excel at creativity. Indeed, when you consider the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century as reported on the National Academy of Engineering website - innovations such as human flight, refrigeration, electrification, the telephone, automobiles, television, computers, space travel and the Internet - you see that almost all of them were either invented by Americans, or had some crucial American link that helped turn a fledgling technology into a major boon for human kind."
Endless debate. Check here who was the real telephone inventor, an italian living in Italy in a region where they speak italian and french.
No american connection at all.
Now a MP 2600+ (the fastest I can find) it's 300 euro.I think the price of the Opteron 240 was around 400 euro, 3 months ago. So I think that now the performance/price ratio should be slightly higher for the Opteron... and it just can get bigger in the future. I'm looking forward to my next 4/8 processor Opteron machine!
I'm using a dual Opteron (model 240, 1.4 GHz) for intensive scientific calculations. Our program, on the Opteron system, works 1.5 to 2 times faster than the 32 bit version that runs on a double Athlon MP 1800+ (1.533 GHz), depending on the algorithm.
why SMP nowadays?
If I was doing stuff for school / research, Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, Spice (ok not 100% sure on spice) are all single processor only.
Well, I'm doing programs for research, in biomagnetism field. We have to display up to 1.5 GB of data (in different ways: magnetic map display, channel display, frequency spectrum display) and make different kind of math analysis on them.
The programs need to be as fast as possible (faster programs mean more subjects analyzed a day), so we write our own C++ code (using a couple of math libraries too) in a multithreaded fashion. Depending on the algorithm the speed gain ranges between 1.2/1.8 times the single processor version. In our work SMP isn't just useful, is necessary!
And don't forget that if you write a multithreaded algorithm in a good way, it'll be scalable to N processors just changing a variable. It means that if in the future we'll have cheap machines with 4 processors we'll just have to change some #defines and get double the speed.