Question abou SMP?

[fearfox]

How exactly does this work? is it an advantage to user or disadvantage. Do most programs and game nowadays supporta and use dual Processors.

[DocSilly]

A good place to start with SMP might be http://www.2cpu.com

SMP can be an advantage. It really helps when the program is coded for multi-CPU usage, most are not.

There are few games that support SMP:
- Q3A and games based on the engine
- Falcon 4
- StarSiege

You need a SMP capable OS in the first place:
- WinNT
- Linux/Unix etc
- BeOS
DOS/Win9x/ME does not support SMP.

SMP will help most with software that is coded for SMP-usage BUT it will also help a little with regular software. The OS shares the apps on both CPU, like program A and C run on CPU1 while B and D run on CPU2.

You can setup your system to run most of the background processes on CPU1 and use CPU2 for regular games with a high-priority or running folding@home or something like that.
This would give you the full power of one CPU for your game while most of the OS runs on the other CPU. So you could see a performance increase even in programs that're not coded for SMP.

- Will you see double the performance on a 2-CPU system ?
Nope but you will see a noticable performance increase with SMP-coded software. Single threaded software might see a little performance gain due to the fact that the OS shares the threads on both CPU.

- Is SMP worth the money ?
Not really, only when you heavily use SMP-coded software. SMP setups are still quite expensive due to the fact that most SMP mobos are targeted at the server market and they have onboard SCSI etc. These boards don't have a lot of overclocking options.

At least that's my point of view on SMP.

[Kakarot]

Everything doc said is good information(not that hearing it from me makes a huge difference )... but you will see much better performance on certain programs with SMP while at the same time other programs probably won't see any gain at all. I know Photoshop is one of those programs that really benefit from SMP. I know anandtech had some reviews of the new AMD SMP setups in the past few months that shows some benchmarks of different programs on SMP and if they benefitted or not. You may want to check it out.

[DocSilly]

Here is another new comparison between XEON and Athlon MP setups:

http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardware_ ... cssid=&tp=

You can see that single threaded programs (like 97% of all the software) don't benefit at all when you add a second CPU (even surprised me a little).
Only multi threaded programs benefit from a second CPU.
Hmm, I would've liked to see how Q3A benefits with SMP enabled but it's also important to see that single threaded games (they used Q2) don't gain performance.

[randomniss]

Well I run dual pIII 750's on the Abit VP6 and on that board you have all of the overclocking advantages as on any of their other boards ( i just like abit that way but for the most part the other guys pretty much summed it up. I would not spen the money on it UNLESS you are a 3 animator, doing film or producing soud or music or running a server of somekind with lots of traffic, and umm thats about it, its not gonna increase your fps in q3 somthing silly, I know there are not very many progs out at all that even support it, I saw a list onces it might have been at toms hardware dot com, went something like: 3d Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Sound Forge, umm and a few more. But I really like my dually it works very well for me, but I do spend 85% of my time using 3dsmax so it kinda makes sence. But if you are gonna play games I would get a 2 gig p4 with the intel 860 chpset mmm makes me drool

[tyler_durden]

i used to have a dual celeron setup. wasn't really worth the trouble. unless you are doing photoshop. you notice some gains when you are doing many things (ie mp3, word, frontpage and a few others) but nowadays, these all run fine on a single processor system. there are no performance gains in gamming, actually slows you down some b/c the processors spend resources coordinating activity.

if you are running a linux box, there may also be some benefit. most of the code is dual processor so you will notice some speed increases.

my advice would be spend that money and buy a fast single processor system.