Re: A Question about Dual CPU systems

["Dirk Terrell" <terrell@boulder.swri.edu>]

On Thu, 09 May 2002 12:37:15 -0500, Tom Droege wrote:

>I assume that such a system does not make the pipeline run faster.  Is this 
>true?  Seems to me that the code would have to know about the available cpu 
>and this would take a lot of special code.

Correct if the pipeline doesn't use threaded/forked code.

>I assume that what a second processor would buy me is the ability to 
>simultaneously work on the data while the pipeline was running at little 
>loss of power.  Is this true?

Correct.

>Does a dual cpu system make economic sense.  I.e. are they so expensive 
>that I would be better off running two computers and getting a network 
>going to move the data around?

They're not that expensive. I just ordered a dual Athlon motherboard, 2
Athlon 1900+ CPUs and 256 MB of RAM for about $800 to replace an old
Pentium 3 machine. I'm using the case, disk, etc from the old machine.
The Athlons are pretty good at floating point stuff.

>Anyone have any recommended place to buy a dual cpu bare bones system?

I usually buy the parts and build them myself.

Dirk