Xeon vs. Intel Quad?

[bob]

Depends on your application. One has a 14% higher clock rate, the other a 50% bigger cache. So if your application is not really helped by L2, you'd be off better with the Q6700.

The Xeon must be a 45nm design. Otherwise, the chips are nearly identical.

Thanks,
That is what I saw but I wanted to know whether there was anything else to consider. So, basically, one or the other will be a gamble without testing it. Among other things, it will run a molecular dynamics program. I have the feeling that is memory intensive and the Xeon may be better, but... who knows. I will check prices of the motherboards.

For chess, it may depend on the program...

Miguel

the primary difference is that the xeon can go multiple chips, say a quad chip box with quad core chips. Non xeons don't support that. Xeons have a larger L2 (possibly, some do not) as well although that is much less significant than the ability to have 16 or 32 cores easily.

[mhull]

Depends on your application. One has a 14% higher clock rate, the other a 50% bigger cache. So if your application is not really helped by L2, you'd be off better with the Q6700.

The Xeon must be a 45nm design. Otherwise, the chips are nearly identical.

Thanks,
That is what I saw but I wanted to know whether there was anything else to consider. So, basically, one or the other will be a gamble without testing it. Among other things, it will run a molecular dynamics program. I have the feeling that is memory intensive and the Xeon may be better, but... who knows. I will check prices of the motherboards.

For chess, it may depend on the program...

Miguel

the primary difference is that the xeon can go multiple chips, say a quad chip box with quad core chips. Non xeons don't support that. Xeons have a larger L2 (possibly, some do not) as well although that is much less significant than the ability to have 16 or 32 cores easily.

What's the most number of processors crafty has ever run on?

What number of processors can it reasonably scale to in its current design?

[bob]

Depends on your application. One has a 14% higher clock rate, the other a 50% bigger cache. So if your application is not really helped by L2, you'd be off better with the Q6700.

The Xeon must be a 45nm design. Otherwise, the chips are nearly identical.

Thanks,
That is what I saw but I wanted to know whether there was anything else to consider. So, basically, one or the other will be a gamble without testing it. Among other things, it will run a molecular dynamics program. I have the feeling that is memory intensive and the Xeon may be better, but... who knows. I will check prices of the motherboards.

For chess, it may depend on the program...

Miguel

the primary difference is that the xeon can go multiple chips, say a quad chip box with quad core chips. Non xeons don't support that. Xeons have a larger L2 (possibly, some do not) as well although that is much less significant than the ability to have 16 or 32 cores easily.

What's the most number of processors crafty has ever run on?

What number of processors can it reasonably scale to in its current design?

I have run on a 64-way box. I have tested quite a bit on a 16-way where the scaling is approximately the same as for 2-4-8. The 64-way box was a different animal (Itanium-based) and it took a while to get decent speedup numbers there as that was part of the early NUMA testing we did...

[Nid Hogge]

Thanks a lot. I am not planning to do overclocking because when it run scientific software for a month, I have to decrease the chances of catastrophe to the minimum possible. However, it seems that people are overclocking these with no apparent bad effects. The other thing I do not have experience overclocking.

Sound like all options are ok. I will check the motherboards now

Miguel

If you are staying at stock, Q9300 is your best bet.

Good luck ,