Dual core AMDs (was Re: [Gllug] Recording Ogg streams?)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 08:20:59PM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> Do you need a new motherboard for a dual core processor, or will they go
> in an existing one with an appropriate socket?  Does the BIOS need to be
> multi-core aware?  Does Linux just see the system as having two CPUs?

Many of the existing AMD-64 motherboards ought be able to have Dual core
CPUs dropped into them, but you'll almost certainly need a BIOS upgrade. 
You also may need a kernel update, because with the dual cores they changed
the way the BIOS enumerates CPUs, and there's some other oddities which
can cause stability problems with kernels pre-dating dual core availability.

> > bogomips        : 4374.52
> 
> Presumably that figure is per-processor?

As far as the kernel is concerned, each core will show up in /proc/cpuinfo
as a separate CPU - they pretty much appear same as traditional SMP system,
just with a slightly NUMA-ish leaning for memory. So, yes a dual core
will really give you double the bogomips.

Dan.
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