DUAL CPU board vs 2 Single CPU boards: bang for buck?

[Jim Fraser]

I don't desire to start a flame but it seems to me that for computational
intensive and memory intensive work that 2 singles are better and in most
cases cheaper then a dual setup.  The dual SMP systems out there now have to
fight for bandwidth along the same bus.  The AMD chips while fast appear to
be starved for data when *big* memory jobs are running.  Further I don't see
the cost benefits, if you actually dig into the "bang-for-buck" duals never
seem to win.

The only significant benefit I see from dual is less hardware and higher
computing density, that may be reason enough to go with duals esp. if your
application does not require a lot of memory fetches.

Jim Fraser