Don't know if this old news or not.

[Joel]

Saw today in an ad for the Best Buys in my area that they are now sell AlienWare computers.

Joel

[isochar]

Old news.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by isochar
Old news.

Coming next week, somebody teaches isochar how to be polite.

[Jon P. Inghram]

He's not being rude, he's practicing conservitive data economics!

[isochar]

Amazing how smilies change the context of a message. (I was *not* being rude, it's just the way you read it.) Hm, better put a smilie before someone thinks that this post is rude.

[Greebe]

I was in Best Buy down in Sarasota today and they had them (just came in).

[Jammrock]

I'd rather build my own gaming machine

mmmmmm...dual Athlon's...

Jammrock

[isochar]

Dual-proc rigs are slower in all games than their uni-proc equivalents.

[Duty]

Originally posted by isochar
Dual-proc rigs are slower in all games than their uni-proc equivalents.

You forgot your smilie


Jeff

[isochar]

Damn. My netiquette is awful.

[Wombat]

Dual-proc rigs are slower in all games than their uni-proc equivalents.

I don't buy that at all. Sure, it's slower sometimes. but even with a game designed for one thread of control, if you can devote an entire processor to the game, and the other processor to servicing the rest of the PC, there are speed improvements to be had. Also, once people get proper SMP drivers written.....

[KeiFront]

Dual processors are definatly not slower in games. My duallie is a tad faster in games with the two procs activated. And the smillie

[isochar]

Every benchmark I've seen always shows Duallies falling behind. Perhaps if you have a lot of programs running in the background it will make a difference.

[SteveC]

Also, when working with multi processor machines, remember amdahl's law.

In essence - 2 CPUs does not equal 2 x 1CPU

[Duty]

Originally posted by SteveC
Also, when working with multi processor machines, remember amdahl's law.

In essence - 2 CPUs does not equal 2 x 1CPU

I agree...

The rule of thumb we use for SMP math is:

First CPU = 1
Second CPU = .5
Third CPU = .25
Fourth CPU = .125

There is a lot of loss in Symmetric Multi-Processing from inner-processor communication. This is the primary reason that SMP has been such a pain to implement. And the only people to use more then two processors in a windows environment have tons of money. The last time I looked there was only one manufacturer left making four processor (Intel based) machines, Compaq. If you look at the large-scale implementations of multi-processor computers you find either a combination of SMP and AMP (Asymmetric Multi-Processing) or straight AMP.

By the way we use this for both Linux and Windows. Neither has had a lot of luck with the SMP game. At least, as of, the last time I looked. It has been a while.


Jeff