[Beowulf] Re: Opteron 275 performance

[Mark Hahn]

> It seems there is an increasingly dominating opinion that the second 
> core is meant to run anti-virus protection software 24 hours a day.

only in the sense that all CPUs are intended to run desktop-windows :|

seriously, if that were the case, then there would be little point to 
providing both CPUs with giant 1MB caches.  ("giant" here is relative to 
the amount of die area devoted to computation, of course!)

I find that most software has a pretty high flops-per-byte ratio, at least 
as compared to Stream/daxpy.  dual-core K8's seem like a pretty clear win,
though memory contention and higher single-core clocks can argue against.
(I'm about to receive 1536 single-core AMD's...)

regards, mark hahn.