[Beowulf] Re: Opteron 275 performance

[Kozin, I (Igor)]

> > 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 was not saying that was my opinion. I was referring to all those
popular adverts ("IMAGINE A WORLD" type of thing) where they can't 
think of anything else for you to do with the second core.
Oh, the other things is downloading. Most likely the patches for
the anti-virus software.

On the contrary I am seeing quite a good benefit for certain type 
of applications.
 
> 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...)

But I also do understand why you did prefer the single cores :)
 
> regards, mark hahn.

Best,
Igor