Ever since dual-core processors became widely available, I’ve wanted to do some tests. Sure, technology Web sites offer the results of a battery of standard tests on the latest and greatest chips, but I typically find these tests lacking, largely because the benchmarks have little to do with the demands of a cluster.
Recently, I had the opportunity to benchmark a Pentium D processor, thanks to Appro International (http://www.appro.com). Now, some may argue that the Pentium D isn’t a “cluster processor.” I’ll leave that argument for another day. The real problem at hand is memory contention, or how well do the processors share memory. For example, does one processor or core reading or writing memory cause the other processor or core to wait? Now that we live in the multi-core age, the question is becoming very important. Both Intel and AMD have radically different approaches to multi-core. Motherboards and chipsets play an important role as well.
Like all benchmarks, your application is the best measure of system performance. The simple test I demonstrate this month provides a small but important peek behind the CPU curtain.
Time for a Script
A good question to ask is, “If I run two identical programs at the same time on a dual core, one on each core, does performance suffer?” To try an answer this question, let’s develop a simple test: If a program takes one minute to run on a single core, how long does it take if the…
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