AMD Dual Core CPU's

[Sasha Tsykin]

Thilo Six wrote:
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> Billy Verreynne (JW) schrieb am 30.01.2006 06:55:
>   
>> Ed Fletcher wrote:
>>
>>
>>     
>>> I'm looking at a new motherboard/cpu combination and I'm
>>> looking for info on how well the dual core cpu's from AMD
>>> work with Ubuntu Breezy.
>>>       
>> <snip>
>>
>> As a very general rule of thumb:
>>
>> Desktop software are usually designed and written as single threaded
>> processes. Increasing CPU capacity does not really help. A faster CPU
>> is needed to make them go faster.
>>     
not necessarily, eg. video conversion, image conversion, encoding, 
compiling, etc. will always benefit from more cpu's or more cpu cores.
>> Most server-side software are written as multi-threaded processes.
>> E.g. instead of 1 process doing all the work, the work is broken up
>> into pieces that can be done in parallel. Additional CPU capacity
>> allows more parallel processing and thus an increase in performance.
>>     
true
>> IMO for normal desktop use a dual-core CPU has no obvious benefits. If
>> you are a gamer.. well, more and more games are making use of a
>> multi-threaded design. Also on Windows, any DirectX game will by
>> default be creating and using several DirectX threads (doing graphics,
>> sounds, etc). In this case a dual-core CPU can increase game
>> performance (the CPU is usually the bottleneck and not the VPU).
>>     
this is just wrong. If you want your games to work faster, then you 
should by a motherboard with pci express, if you don't already have it, 
make sure it's AMD, make sure that the latencies are reasonably low, and 
get a good graphics card. While it is true that here the cpu is usually 
the bottleneck, it's not going to help to run a multi threaded cpu 
because games are almost always single threaded and very few take 
advantage of multiple threading. Incidentally, this is the reason why 
AMD is better for gaming than Intel, because Intel focused a lot of 
research on multi-threading technology, while AMD made their 
single-threaded chips more efficient. Also, a faster CPU will make very 
little difference for gaming. Ultimately, it's the graphics card that's 
important there. Any AMD64 processor will do fine.
>> If you use Ubuntu more in a server/service like fashion (running a web
>> server, sendmail, RSS feeds, ripping music, burning DVDs, etc, all at
>> the same time), then additional CPU capacity likely is needed.
>>     
not necessarily needed, but it would help.
>> --
>> Billy
>>     
Sasha