[Beowulf] Nehalem Xeons lest think about 6 core Dunningtons ifjust drool factor

[Tom Elken]

> [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Mark Hahn
> 
> > If you really want to drool then Intel's new 6 CORE
> 
> nah.  to me, it's just a density play - nothing wrong with that,
> but not really interesting.  if you have small-memory, 
> cache-friendly code,
> you'll be happy, but putting 6 cores on the same old tired memory
> is not what I'd call an HPC solution. 

To support Mark's statement, at this page, 
http://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cpu2006&op=form
you can enter '6' in the "# Cores Per Chip " field
and hit the "Fetch Results" button at the bottom.

You will see 36 results as hits -- I think they are all Dunnington.  The
more interesting are the "CINT2006 Rates" and "CFP2006 Rates" as you
scroll down.

I think that some of the Integer Rate results are records or near
records for x86_64 compatible machines, at least for 4-CPU (4 socket)
machines.
I think the FP Rate results are very good, but not quite at the level of
some 4-socket, 16-core AMD Barcelona results.  Since FP is more relevant
for HPC (not that INT is totally irrelevant), this supports Mark's
point.

-Tom

> iirc, the 6-core chips 
> are also 
> quite big/expensive.