On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 10:57 PM, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
I have partly a question and partly a survey. I just got a P4 2.4ghz (c) proc, mb w/ 512M DDR400 dropped in my lap at work so I could upgrade my workstation in the office. It does have hyperthreading. I've never user HT hardware and I've heard conflicting reports about it. I have it turned off right now and I haven't installed the SMP kernel since I'm not sure I'm going to bother. I guess my question is...for a workstation doing webbrowsing, documents in OO, Gaim, playing mp3's and s**tloads of xterms. Does HT give or take away from the enviroment as far as speed and all that. All opinions are welcome. :)
I don't have too much experience in dual/ht processors, but all the information I've read leads me to the conclusion that duals are slower for common tasks. Unless your doing a lot of Photoshop type work, video editing, or audio editing then you really have nothing to gain. Here's a link to a lengthy benchmark using win xp. Takes a while to get to the good parts. A lot of explanation of the hw. http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20021114/ I recommend the average user like me :-) just get a faster single and not pay for an additional processor that will rarely get used. I have a dual pIII board that I experimented with a while. Used 2kpro, 2kserver, SuSE 7.3 and mandrake. Couldn't tell the difference with any of them so I just made 2 boxes and sold one to pay for the other. I would think you take a performance hit using ht. Tom's test seem to show that also. Of course I could be wrong. Linux might take better advantage of the architecture with a custom kernel. I would be interested in seeing more info. For what it's worth. will Ps. I recently did a lot of research on mac duals for a friend. I can dig those up if you want some RISC processor info also. Pretty much the same as P4. No substantial gains for average user, only mathematically intensive apps and a/v rendering. Still seems performance is more related to bus speeds, vid processors, and ram than proc speeds and how many you have. Quality and not quantity still seems to rule the day. Pss. My apologies for the ramble. The more I proof read this thing, the more involved I become in it. I'm also a bit embarrassed replying to one of the list guru's technical questions.