[wplug] cores

[Tom Rhodes]

On Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:30:50 -0500
"Brian A. Seklecki" <lavalamp at spiritual-machines.org> wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 21:21 -0500, Zach wrote:
> > dual-core vs core-duo ?
> 
> v.s. better code v.s. 30 amp PDUs
> 
> Generally the core-duo is the desktop line, and dual/quad-core is the
> Xeon server line (and the affiliated north/south bridge / MB chipset --
> and thus buses, RAID Controller, network.)
> 
> Its all marketing though -- CPUs really haven't gotten any faster since
> 2003 when the last genuine P4 3.2 was released, and more cores only
> helps some applications, some libraries/APIs, on some kernels

I'd beg to differ just a little bit.  Not much, but a little
bit.  :)

I see a significant performance increase using my core 2 duo
at the same MHz count as my previous P4 chip.  Granted, I do
understand and even accept that there are other differences, for
instance bus speed, RAM, etc.

For the most part, it's a combination of (mainly) CPU and
scheduling.  If you have a nice processor (or a few), you can
still see extremely bad results if your OS schedular does not
handle thread priority effectively.  Sure, there are a few other
things to consider, coding practices, locking semantics, threading
(1:1 threading vs 1:N threading) etc. etc.

Truth is, if your OS is written properly, the application supports
threads, you should definitely see performance jumps between
CPU speeds with/without these "cores."

Anyway, I'm going to hop back in the void after saying one more
thing:

Python is the worst, most useless programming language I have
seen and I DARE ANYONE to argue with me.  :P

-- 
Tom Rhodes