PC performance, Dual Xeons, etc.

the p4 is probably faster

Scott
ADK

Sonar does utilize all cores. Unless you have an M box or digi soundcard. Jcs does know his $hit when it comes to pc's. Thats what he does. Im just answering your question to , does sonar use bothe cores. goodday
Cj

So I take it that with dual processors you don't add them together to get the total speed? As in, two independant 1.5ghz processors won't be the equivalent of having 1 3ghz processor?

I've given up on the old 530 because I found out someone took the RAM out of it. It wouldn't be worth buying all new RAM for it when I could spend a lot less and put another gig in my P4. I'm just curious about how the whole dual processor thing works. I never understood how they work together or divide the work load, etc.

ORIGINAL: Tube

So I take it that with dual processors you don't add them together to get the total speed? As in, two independant 1.5ghz processors won't be the equivalent of having 1 3ghz processor?

I've given up on the old 530 because I found out someone took the RAM out of it. It wouldn't be worth buying all new RAM for it when I could spend a lot less and put another gig in my P4. I'm just curious about how the whole dual processor thing works. I never understood how they work together or divide the work load, etc.

It's complicated. It depends a lot on the type of workload you're throwing at the machine, and it also depends on the architecture of the system. For example, on Intel systems there can be a performance penalty due to the sharing of the FSB causing memory bandwidth issues as you scale up in number of processors. That often isn't an issue with only two cores, but it can start to show if you go to 4 or 8 core systems. In this particular case, you're talking about an older generation of Xeon running a lesser form of memory on a just plain older platform which means even more points against the 530.

As for the workload, processing on a PC is divided up into pieces called "threads" of code. Dual processor machines are simply two processors in the same system, each able to handle a single thread of code at once (without delving into the Hyperthreading complication). Whether that helps or not depends on the application being run. Apps that are referred to as multithreaded will benefit from having more cores to run on, while apps that are singlethreaded will not. Further complicating things is the fact that some types of processing can be split up more efficiently. Even some multithreaded apps will only gain a small boost by having a second core, while others (mostly just encoding work and such, converting WAVs to MP3s or MPEG2 to DIVX for examples) can actually come very close to reaching the theoretical maximum of being twice as fast as a single processor would be.

So, generally speaking, what you would end up with in this trade:

1) Apps that don't take much advantage of a second core would be SIGNIFICANTLY slower.

2) The few applications that do take extremely good advantage of the second core would be a little faster

3) Bandwidth sensitive apps would likely be slower

4) The platform as a whole would be slightly slower

Overall, I'd not really think it would be worth it. Especially given that there's no RAM in that machine. Given the cost of RAMBUS, you could likely upgrade your current system to something that would stomp on that 530 for less than the price of replacing the memory in the other system.

what p4 you using? 478-pin or 775? if 478 you could go up to 3Ghz processor, if 775 i think about 3.6. just bear in mind dells are a pita to upgrade due to their proprietry mobos and bios, so if you do upgrade ur cpu make sure you've really checked out what you've got in there!! (i had an old dimension 2.4 celeron, wanted to upgrade cpu, but it would only take northwood p4, not any old 478 pin one....) the dell website, somewhere deep in the bowels, has a list of exactly what cpu/mobo/bios yyour system has, get hold of that first...but upgrading ram should be easy enough...