Trials of an Intel Quad Processor System
 

In recent months at AnandTech we have tackled a few issues of dual processor systems for regular use, and whether having a dual processor system as a theoretical scientist may help or hinder various benchmark scenarios. For the problems that I encountered as a theoretical physical chemist, using a dual processor system without any form of formal training dealing with memory allocation (NUMA) resulted in a severe performance hit for anything that required a significant level of memory accesses, especially grid solvers that required pluuing information from large arrays held in memory. Part of the issue was latency access dealing with data that was in the memory of the other CPU, and thus a formal training in writing NUMA code would be applicable for multi-processor systems. Nevertheless in my AnandTech testing we did see significant speedup when dealing with various ‘pre-built’ software scenarios such as video conversion using Xilisoft Video Converter, rendering using PovRay and our 3D Particle Movement Benchmark.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7121/t...rom-supermicro