[Gllug] increase performance by increasing RAM or increasing in Core

[John Hearns]

On the subject of internal processor speeds versus slow access to RAM,
core i7 is of course out but Nehalem is just about upon us. This
implements QuickPath (the equivalent of AMDs Hypertransport).
Hypertransport has been the reason why Opetron has done well in recent
years on memory-intensive codes, while Intel has moved forward on
floating pint performance.
The buzz is that Nehalem is performing well - though I have never seen
one to be honest.

Nehalem has hyperthreading 'done right', so in answer to the original
question a multicore with 'new' hyperthreading may well give you big
benefits (depending on your workload, YMMV, yadda yadda)

Nehalem also has a nice feature of core throttling - if cores are
idle, their power is throttled down and the Mhz of the active cores is
actually pushed up (ie overclocking). This should be interesting for
the Linux kernel, ie. in controlling this behaviour via ACPI and
monitoring what is happening.
Intel call this TurboBoost
http://download.intel.com/design/processor/applnots/320354.pdf?iid=tech_tb+paper
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug