Dual Core / Dual Processor AMD

[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

On 10/24/06, Peter Clutton <peterclutton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I'm about to purchase a new workstatioin just for ubuntu and had a
> question about smp support and benefits. Would appreciate any tips or
> pointers to other information.
>
> If i purchase a dual core opteron or two single core opterons and
> install the smp kernel, will i be getting the full benifits of
> multitasking, as in, it doesn't require multithreaded applications to
> get anything out of it?

If you purchase a dual-core processor, you will be able to take
advantage of both cores even for non-multithreaded applications,
provided that you run more than one task a time. For example, you can
rip two MP3 songs at the sime, one running on each core. For example,
when compiling software, you can use the -j flag to make in order to
compile several targets in parallel.

So, unless you are going to play games (some titles won't take
advantage of multi-core CPUs) it will probably worth. I'm using a
MacBook Pro laptop which has two cores and it's extremely responsive.

> Is the support as stable as running ubuntu on single core/processor,
> which i have found very stable? For instance is it at the stage of 64
> bit support, where there are a few issues and not all software is
> supported etc.

For me, SMP support is extremely stable.

> One final question, can i use smp with the two cores running 32bit smp
> kernel, even though the opteron is 64 bit? I dont care about the the
> advatntages of 64 bit, they would not affect anything i do.

Yes, you can.
But running a  64-bit-enabled kernel and 64-bit applications will
provide greater performance. For example, 64-bit systems allow
applications to use more CPU registers, which can turn in more
performance.

So, unless you intend to run applications that are totally broken for
64-bit, I would go with a 64-bit distribution. I have running SUSE on
64-bit Athlon X2 processors and they perform extremely well.

> If all is totally good, I would pay for the dual core/processor,
> otherwise will pay for the best single core i can get. Thanks in
> advance

I'd go with a dual-core system but that's my personal opinion :-)