[wplug] cores

[Jonathan S. Billings]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 09:30:50PM -0500, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> 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

Bah, take a look at the comparisons of GFLOPS on Intel's export
compliance metrics:

http://www.intel.com/support/processors/xeon/sb/CS-020863.htm

While the Clock speed hasn't really gone up, the FSB speeds are over
twice as fast, so you can definitely see a huge increase in
performance. 

I recently had to explain this to a professor who couldn't understand
why his 256 node 3.2GHz Xeon P4 cluster from 2003 was being
outperformed by a 192 node cluster with 2.6GHz Woodcrest CPUs, and the
new cluster with Harpertown CPUs at 2.83GHz are blowing away the
others without having clock speeds above 3.0GHz.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <wbanguna at gmail.com>