Processor Scalability and Linux

Joshua C. joshuacov at googlemail.com
Sun Aug 8 18:41:33 UTC 2010


2010/8/8 Michael Miles <mmamiga6 at gmail.com>:
> JD wrote:
>>    On 08/08/2010 10:21 AM, Michael Miles wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I myself was going to replace my Phenom 2 965 with the 1090T as it was a
>>> simple chip replacement but I decided to wait for the Bulldozer series.
>>> The 1090T is a big improvement but in reality it is only a Phenom 2 with
>>> 2 more cores added.
>>>
>>> The bulldozer seems like it is going to open some major doors as far as
>>> scalability and just the idea of having 16 cores Hyper threaded to 32
>>> threads is very appealing to me.
>>>
>>> Yes, the board will need replacing and ram too  but I think it will be
>>> worth the wait.
>>>
>>>
>> So what will you do with all that processing power?
>>
> Well, 3D animation is my thing and has been since the Amiga platform.
> The power to render many minutes of animation and still have functional
> machine to do the rest of my daily activity.
>
> I use a virtual machine running windows 7 for my animation software and
> if I want to convert a HD movie at the same time as I do everything else
> it shows a definite slow down.
>
> I remember that very same question with a 1 megabyte ram came out...what
> would you do with all that ram.....
>
> Same thing with cores. What would you do with all that power.
>
> The short answer is there will never be enough power to a machine as as
> soon as it is developed we see a need for more and more.
>
> Bloody computer junkies eh!!!!
> Never satisfied ( Ya baby)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Well, the question is not why I need "that much" power but simply will
a linux app run better on a 6-core than on a 4-core processor? Of
course it depends on the ability of this app to utilize all this
cores/threads. And I know that whatever is on the market today will be
obsolete in less than a year. This doesn't change the question:

How can I judge if a particular _linux_ app will work well with a
6-/4-core cpu? What to look for? How does the OS interact with the app
in allowing it to use the resources? Is the app solely responsible for
utilizing all the system resources? Are more cores/threads really
better?

This is what I mean with scalability. As for the windows-apps: most of
them (still) cannot use all the cores and a more-than-2-cores cpu is a
waste-of-money in most of the time. Lets go back to linux.

--Joshua


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