Duel Processors?

slimdog55 · Post by **slimdog55** » Tue Mar 02, 2004 12:35 am

If you have a duel processor, is your computer going to be fast as hell? Can someone please explain about it. Thanks.

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Tue Mar 02, 2004 12:53 am

If you are running windows2k/XP and if you are running apps that support multi-threading, then you will notice an improvement.. will it be lightning fast? Not necessarily, but you will be able to do more before you notice a real performance falloff. Will your video render in half the time? No, or at least a probably not, there will be some improvement but probably not close to half. The amount of RAM and the speed of your drives will still be the bottlenecks on the system. Does it run things smoother- definitely. I run a low end dual machine here at home for editing rendering (P-III 500's with 512 MB RAM ) It runs XP very well, but stutters a bit on MPeg playback, render times are acceptable, but not incredibly fast. As an experiment we set up a dual board at work for an editing station - dual AMD 2400's with 1 GB of RAM, a single 2800 with 1 GB gave similar, albeit somewhat slower render times. For the difference would it be worth using a dual board, not if editing was your primary function. And if apps do not support multithreading and dual procs,m then you will see little to no performance increase. Premiere Pro seems to like them better, but it still doesn't seemt o be worth it for editing. I have found, however, much better performance on server apps such as routing and our mail server on the servers we have taken to dual procs at work.

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 2:53 pm

yes, my P4 came with hyper-threading, i can run like 3 things at once if i wanted to and would still work great.

Reiji · Post by **Reiji** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 5:41 pm

HT fools the computer into thinking it has two processors (going by that, mine then runs at 6.12GHz) when it actually doesn't (so mine runs at 3.06GHz really). It's clever optimisation.

El Brenty · Post by **El Brenty** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 6:09 pm

We've had talks about dual-processor systems before. They only work if your operating system and applications shooprt the extra hardware, otherwise it'll sit there pretending to be a single processor computer!

justsomeguy · Post by **justsomeguy** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 1:22 am

isnt it mostly good for runniong more than one app? so that one proc can do some, and the other proc the others?

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 2:05 am

The OS can be split between procs on Windows boxes that support SMP ( Symetric Muti Processing) which is the only Multi processing supported by win. You need Win2k or XP to be able to take advantage of Multi procs, and the app must support it also. Premiere Pro will take advantage of Multi proc, older versions don't. It is NOT a speed doubler, the increase, while noticeable, is nowhere near doubled. And if your apps don't support it, performance gains are negligible...

Epsilon · Post by **Epsilon** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 7:06 am

Hmm. Speed wise, the more processors you have, you will notice it about 50% faster for each additional processor. So a dual processor will run around 150% faster than a single. More than two processors in a system is not very common though!

El Brenty · Post by **El Brenty** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 3:50 pm

Not forgetting all the other countless other factors that make up the performance of your computer, including:

Memory speed
Drive system, including cache, and transfer speeds
Graphics card accelleration
Other stuff like networking that may pull ont he computer's resources slightly rather than have dedicated processing (This was the difference between my Ã‚Â£150 D-link NIC and a cheaper Ã‚Â£30 3COM card!)
Software running in background, including pre-load startup program segments, spyware, etc.

Little by little all the performance drop-offs from "bad" hardware and unclean software will affect your performance, so before you start buying multi-processor systems, see if you can get your system running optimally first, take the slowest part of the computer and spend money upgrading that.

By the way, you lot really need to pay more attention to your spelling:

DUEL - when 2 adversaries confront each other to resolve a conflict, usually in a form of combat
DUAL - A pair working together

Almost the same word, completely opposite meaning!

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 2:59 pm

so you all r tellin me ( i know i have duel whatever cause that log in my planetside folder told me all my specs) that my system is running 2.6 ghz its actually running 5.2 ghz? P4?

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 3:16 pm

No you have DDR Dual density ram, not dual processors, you'd know if you had those LOL ( big bucks) and even dual procs DO NOT run any faster, they simple split the load between the two processors IF the OS and the application both suppt it ( OS would win2k or XP ) as far as editing apps, PremPro supports duals, AE 5.5 or under and Prem 6.5 or under do not, in that case the second proc does very little work, it picks up a bit of the OS function, but is basically just loafing along. Hyper threading does not fool the proc into thinking it is a dual, it allows the processor to more efficiently handle threads from multiple apps on a single processor. It is simply a hardware manipulation that allows the already existing dual pipelines ( have been in place since the P-I chips) to execute instructions in parallel, previously they were in near parallel. It is NOT the same or even close to having dual procs. Even duals that do not support true hyperthreading. Also hyperthreading will allow the single processor to execute threads from apps that are not truely 'apartment model' apps to support true SMP.

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 2:32 pm

well heres something interesting. My pc was lagging after i had shut down my game planetside. It took forever but since i was running 2 at once i figured ok, its alright. I hit CTRL + ALT+ DEL....and the thing came up. I looked at the "preformance" tab...There was a weird option that caught my eye. When i right clicked on it, it gave me the option to look at one big graph for the preformance, or to have 2 seperate ones for the processors...So does this mean i have 2 processors? I mean everything runs great...etc...what does this mean?

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:07 pm

No the option is there because XP out of the box will support multiple processors..