Dual Core or Quad Core?

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Fri Jun 29 11:47:32 EDT 2007


Warren,

These days the Linux kernel scales fairly linearly for eight processors,
so the real questions are:

o on the eight-core system, how often would you keep the fifth to eighth
core busy?
o on the four-core system, how often would you have processes in the run
queue looking for a processors and have them all busy, causing some
processes to wait in the run queue.

I think you are right, as the students come into the class and all start
the applications at the same time, or the teacher is stepping them
through a set of tasks and they all hit "enter", you will see peaks of
processing need that would tend to lean toward the four-core chips as
the better method of handling them.

Linux and Unix systems tend to do things with light-weight processes,
threads, etc. that tend to allow parallel processing when the processors
are available, as opposed to more monolithic, single-threaded systems.
LTSP just accentuates this.

My two cents.

md



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