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Intel Hyperthreading

17 REPLIES 17
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Message 1 of 18
edarlak
979 Views, 17 Replies

Intel Hyperthreading

In about a month or so I plan on building a couple new workstations. These workstations will be designed to use IV & COSMOS/DesignStar at the same time. I plan to build a system based on the Tyan Thunder i7505 S2665 motherboard. Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, 4 GB ram, 36GB 15k RPM U320 hard drive & a PNY Quadro FX 2000. My question is, should I stick with the pure Dual setup and not use hyperthreading? If I enable hyperthreading, does this mean I'll have 4 CPU threads at my disposal? Will IV use two of those threads only, or is it capable of using all 4?
17 REPLIES 17
Message 2 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

I would personally have used dual athlons, but that's another matter.

No, hyperthreading will NOT cive you 4 CPU's, although windows will
think so.
A hyperthreaded will NOT give you double processor power over a standard
CPU. But in some cases it will do things faster, like if one task is
interger-heavy calculation and another is floatingpoint-heavy.
And then again some times it is supposed do be not as efficient as a
standard CPU.

I would have opted for hyperthreaded CPU's, and experimented with
enabling/disabling hyperthreading in Bios.

Jorgen
Message 3 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

I thought the p4's weren't hyperthreading until
they got up to 3.06 GHz? Is this not true?

 

kp


style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
In
about a month or so I plan on building a couple new workstations. These
workstations will be designed to use IV & COSMOS/DesignStar at the same
time. I plan to build a system based on the Tyan Thunder i7505 S2665
motherboard. Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, 4 GB ram, 36GB 15k RPM U320 hard drive & a
PNY Quadro FX 2000. My question is, should I stick with the pure Dual setup
and not use hyperthreading? If I enable hyperthreading, does this mean I'll
have 4 CPU threads at my disposal? Will IV use two of those threads only, or
is it capable of using all 4?
Message 4 of 18
edarlak
in reply to: edarlak

I will go with Dual Athlon's if Hyperthreading does nothing for me. I use nothing but Athlon's for my gaming machines at home, so I have a lot of experience with them, just not Athlon MP's.
Message 5 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

Keith Panik wrote:
> I thought the p4's weren't hyperthreading until they got up to 3.06
> GHz? Is this not true?
>

True, but he is not talking about P4, He is talking about Xeon's
(Multi-processor version of P4).
Message 6 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

So which Xeons support hyperthreading? Man, just when I thought I was
getting a handle on all of this!

kp




"Jorgen Bjornes" wrote in message
news:F322B1814C354557AA9963D08C2B6506@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> Keith Panik wrote:
> > I thought the p4's weren't hyperthreading until they got up to 3.06
> > GHz? Is this not true?
> >
>
> True, but he is not talking about P4, He is talking about Xeon's
> (Multi-processor version of P4).
>
Message 7 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

Not quite sure.
But they have supposedly had it for a while.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could tell us.
Message 8 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

xeons have HT from 2ghz to 2.8ghz


Matt
Message 9 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

I didn't think xeons had hyperthreading.

 

Also I read that the program has to be written with
hyperhtreading in mind to get the 20 - 30% advantage claimed by
Intel.

 

4GB ram may be a waste as windows only addresses
2GB unless you install the 3 GB switch a patch which is a little tricky to
install.

 

inventor then only uses 2GB however i have heard a
rumour that Invetor7 will use the 3GB.

 

dave

 

 

 

 
Message 10 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

Thanks Matt.

kp



"Matt Stocking" wrote in message
news:f14b3f3.6@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
> xeons have HT from 2ghz to 2.8ghz
>
>
> Matt
>
>
Message 11 of 18
rllthomas
in reply to: edarlak

With Designstar 3.0 it actually ran slightly slower with 2 processors as opposed to 1. Unless something has changed with the new version well..... as Kent argues your machine may be available to do other things while Cosmos runs but 2 processors won't speed Cosmos up.
Message 12 of 18
edarlak
in reply to: edarlak

The large amount of RAM is more for COSMOS than IV. And like I said, I typically run the two programs at the same time. Are you telling me with the two programs running, windows can only utilize 2GB? If so, whay are they selling MOBO's that can take 4GB of RAM?
Message 13 of 18
edarlak
in reply to: edarlak

Well, the problem I have now is COSMOS runs into page RAM unless I run a draft quality mesh on the more complicated studies. IV has to be opened when you bring in a navtive IV file. I generally leave both programs running so it's faster when I want to tweak the model, update geomety, re-mesh the model etc. I guess I'm hoping 1 CPU can be utilized for Inventor & 1 CPU for COSMOS. As for the 4 GB of RAM, I run 1 GB right now, and that's not cutting it for COSMOS. I guess I'll have to look into whether or not 4 GB is worth it.
Message 14 of 18
rllthomas
in reply to: edarlak

You will need to set the processor affinity for one of the applications to cause it to use the second CPU effectively. As for RAM a 32 bit OS can only provide access to 2 GB of memory per process. Inventor can access 2 GB and Cosmos can grab 2 GB theoretically. In reality you also have a system limit on memory access so if your OS can only support 3 GB then obviously both programs can't use 4 GB...its complicated.
Message 15 of 18
edarlak
in reply to: edarlak

Can you direct me to a link or something that I can use to research this RAM access issue?
Message 16 of 18
Anonymous
in reply to: edarlak

you dont have to set affinity unless you dont want
it using a specific processer. if you have 2 apps open and they both are
crunching numbers, the os will divide up the cpu's to them. they wont just use
the first one.

 

Matt
Message 17 of 18
rllthomas
in reply to: edarlak

From what I have been able to gather ram above 2 GB is used for PCI devices, managing virtual memory etc. As usual the Linux world has some of the best information on this topic. Here are some links that may be of value:

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ProductInfo/terminal/tsarchitecture.asp
http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/LinuxRamLimits
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;291988

Rich Thomas
Message 18 of 18
edarlak
in reply to: edarlak

Thanks for the links. It appears that buying anything above 2GB is a waste of money until there is an OS out there that can utilize it. Well, at the mercy of Bill Gates once again! The 3GB switch really does not look like a good option on a workstation running Inventor. Thank's very much for this heads up!

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