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Name: XxxFrancisxxxUSA
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qs.html
Someone please buy me this motherboard, and the four cpus for it. Lol. Woweee!
Microsoft updates server, I'm doing a favor for my neighbor, Bill. Lol.
If someone bought me that for nothing, I'd find some use for it, lol.
I just thought it was an interesting thing to post, pretty awesome to run four cpous in one machine with a possible 20 gigs of ram!
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so much confusion about speed compared to bandwidth... and multiprocesors.
You won't run anything any faster with quad than with single. Why? Because whatever you are running has to be coded to be symetric multiprocessing to be able to use anything above 1 processor.
so you load Doom, its never even going to touch the other three processors.
now lets throw in hyperthreading. You now need a version of W2K/XP that supports EIGHT PROCESSORS. Can you say enterprise OS and its associated cost?
There is also the misconcept that more processors means they add up to more speed. This is the fundimental difference between speed and bandwidth. You get more bandwidth not speed with more processors.
Its like this: you have a two lane freeway. You can get X amount of cars but they all travel 55mph. With four lanes you get more cars on the freeway but they are STILL going 55mph.
This is why folks who jumped on buying the 64bit mainboards for home were wasting their money. No OS nor app can use it yet. Silly. All because not understanding speed vs bandwidth.
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Not everything is about playing Doom. Linux 2.6 scales well on AMD64, and it's as free for 4 CPUs as 1.
If I were looking to compile loads of code, I would run AMD64 SMP, unqestionably. Developers need build boxes, and something like this would be perfect. I'm not a developer, but I do use a source-based Linux distribution, and a computer like this would compile code amazingly fast.
Web servers like apache would also scale to 4 Opterons, even though you wouldn't need that much power. I'm sure my site would be perfectly happy on a 386.
I could also use a box like this for backups. I could start 4 compressed backups at once, and all would run very fast. It would probably be fast enough to use a PPM-based compressor. If I had that kind of money though, I would probably just buy a bigger hard drive or some other backup solution, however.
You were almost right about "No OS nor app can use it yet." Some apps can use it, but the big advantage is running many apps at the same time. I could be updating my system from source, updating underpowered machines by the magic of distcc, running a few miscellaneous servers, doing a compressed backup, and playing Doom III. That's the true power of SMP.
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Excellent points Jake. You were right on, especially with Linux [this is a windows forum so I talk MS here] up until the part about RUNNING MULTIPLE APPS.
First off we are talking 4 processors and hyperthreading. Second don't confuse a SMP OS with SMP APP. They are not the same. You are assuming that because you have a SMP OS that ALL apps you run will be SMP. This is not the case.
In the examples you give they would ALL be running on a single processor.
Real simple real world test: get a dual or quad board and load [we're talking MS now] your smp OS. Run your backups, doom and whatever and use performace monitor to track all the cpus. I have done it. You will find two behaviours.
One is the load is switched from one processor to another but never at the same time. This is because the app isn't smp written. The other, like MS SQL server, will assign some processes to one processor and others to the other and it is SMP written.
Backup is not smp nor are 97% of the apps you run. I have played with Linux and have worked with Unix and VMS [now there is a REAL OS] but I can't buy what you say that Linux can run backup as SMP. Heck it wasn't but a few years back Linux didn't even have multiprocessor support. Ms did before Linux [darn I hate to say that].
Now maybe I haven't been keeping up. So you are saying that ALL Linux apps are SMP written and Linux supports hyperthreading???
Hmm I must have missed my Red Hat under the brim update email on that one.So what ver are you talking about?
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you got me curious Jake so I did some poking around. Free 64bit linux? Try $2K
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_1.html
Interesting enought I could only find linux problems with hyperthreading.
Best of luck to you bud! Have fun. I am off fishing for a few days of RNR
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"Free 64bit linux? Try $2K" - Linux is free, but it's still possible to pay for it. What you're really paying for is support. I don't need a service contract for my desktop, so I would use the free distro I use now, Gentoo.
"Heck it wasn't but a few years back Linux didn't even have multiprocessor support. Ms did before Linux [darn I hate to say that]." - I don't know exactly when Linux got multiprocessor support, but I do know it's running on some of the largest supercomputers in the world now. #6 is actually Linux on Opterons, appropriately enough.
I fail to see the relevance of HyperThreading since we're talking about AMD, but Linux does support it. An HT-enabled P4 is treated the same as 2 physical P4s.
About the backup thing, I said "I could start 4 compressed backups at once," as in "tar czpf 1.tgz /1 & tar czpf 2.tgz /2...". I just picked it because it's something I do occasionally that uses riddiculous amounts of CPU power.
"In the examples you give they would ALL be running on a single processor." - Are you trying to say that if I start a bunch of programs that aren't made for SMP, they would all run on the same CPU? I don't think so. I know most programs won't distribute across all the CPUs, but many of the programs that matter the most do. But even if I'm not using those programs, I would still get better multitasking. I'm working on acquiring a 2 CPU alpha, but I don't think I'll be able to get it anytime soon. I'm a poor college student that relies on freebies for novelty hardware.
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"Are you trying to say that if I start a bunch of programs that aren't made for SMP, they would all run on the same CPU?"
EXACTLY RIGHT. They don't even know about the 2-4th cpu.
The site below states this in a nutshell. Where they say games put backup [in your case].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
Linux should love that dual alpha. Best of luck with your studies.
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"EXACTLY RIGHT. They don't even know about the 2-4th cpu" - No, that's wrong.
In Linux, if I start a bunch of non-SMP-aware processes, the other processors will be utilized. I had always assumed this, but your posts made me question it. I asked on the Gentoo forum, and people running Linux on mutiple processors agree.
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