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

Jim Fraser fraser5 at cox.net
Thu Mar 7 04:24:08 PST 2002


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




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