Jim Dean Sage   Posts: 3022 Joined: 9/21/2006 Location: L'ville, GA  User Profile | Final remark ... Unless you do a lot of other stuff simultaneously on your machine, in my considered opinion, after much testing and research, there is a "law of diminishing returns" re HOW MANY multicore processors are effectively useful. You can configure Dell non-server machines these days with: one, two, four, six, eight or twelve processors in a single box ... Of course the extra proc's cost more ... I believe that four (fer sure) or *maybe* six (doubtful) can be effectively utilized by the automated OS-spread of a single program that was not explicitly coded for multithreaded processing ... but more than that (8 or 12) would be a real waste of money. Machines with 6-12 processors (or many more, for "true servers") are meant for multi-tasking situations, where several (or many) separate operations occur simultaneously. The true bottleneck for number crunching that is data-intensive is and always has been the HARD DRIVE. | |
