[Tfug] Processing/memory throughput and suggestions

[John Gruenenfelder]

I will likely be replacing one or both of our processing workhorses in the
near future, and my boss would like a fairly powerful machine... without going
completely insane on the price, of course.

The machines being replaced each have a single dual-core AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+
CPU and 4GB of memory (only 3.5GB is actually available).

I've found a Gigabyte motherboard (GA-E7AUM-DS2H) that takes a quad-core Intel
CPU and up to 16GB of DDR2-800 memory.  I'd put into that an Intel Q9550S
2.83GHz quad-core CPU with 12MB cache.

But, it occurs to me that I might possibly achieve better throughput if I went
with a true dual-processor motherboard and put onto it two dual-core CPUs.
More paths to the memory means less contention inside the CPUs, but, of
course, there can still only be one thing accessing memory at a time.

Anybody have experience with this sort of thing?  The jobs the machines will
run are quite varied.  Some are processor bound and run for a long time.
Others are memory bound, using huge amounts of memory (large matrices) and
running over and over the memory (such that the cache isn't as useful as it
could be).

I'd also welcome any suggestions for motherboard/CPU/memory combinations that
you think might be better.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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