A Pentium III question?

[sorehead]

If I have two 600 PIII in a dual board with 100mhz front side bus, do I have 600 mhz or a 1.2 gig processor?

 

[AndyHui]

You have 2 600MHz processors. Dual 600MHz. That's it.

You cannot add processor clock speed in an SMP system.

 

[sorehead]

Thats what I thought. So what advantage is there to a dual processor board with dual processors?

 

[BBnet3000]

some apps are optimized for duals. most arent

 

[VIAN]

A CPU can do 1 out of 3 possible things at once. With two CPUs, now two things can be done at the same time. The advantage is usually about 30% increase in performance. Although this also depends on supporting apps and how they use the dual setup.

 

[zephyrprime]

A CPU can do 1 out of 3 possible things at once. With two CPUs, now two things can be done at the same time. The advantage is usually about 30% increase in performance. Although this also depends on supporting apps and how they use the dual setup.

What? 1 out of 3 things? 30% increase in performance?

Look, some apps will see no benefit. Some will see 100% benefit and some will see something in between.

 

[chsh1ca]

Actually, any time you are doing two things at once, you will notice a performance increase with a DP system over a SP system. Since a machine is almost always going to be doing more than one thing (executing more than one process) while someone is using it, you can see a performance benefit. If you are a multitasker, and have several different apps running at the same time, you will notice a big difference on an MP system over a uniprocessor system. This is the premise behind why Intel added HyperThreading to their processors. Testing a single application's performance should never decrease it over single processor, and should increase it if it has been written as a multithreaded application.

 

[VIAN]

Look, son, obviously you need some teaching. Now go here and learn those 3 things.

And a 2nd processor will never double the performance. It uses the same bus and resources. You would basically need a 266 bus for a dual P3 to work perfectly and some PC2700 RAM. Then this might effectively double ther performance. But since that isn't possible, then your just going to be stuck with the 30% performance increase.

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: sorehead
Thats what I thought. So what advantage is there to a dual processor board with dual processors?

You can continue playing solitaire while Outlook opens.

 

[vegetation]

Back in the days when owning two independent systems were costly, it somewhat made sense for a poweruser on a budget to go dual. You could play your games and run background things without a loss of a single frame. I remember this being especially true when I had my icq open, then someone suddenly messaged me, there would be a small hit in framerate on my game ,but with a dual system there would be no such hit.