Hi,

I\'d be interested to know what sort of \"crunch\" times people are getting with modern PC\'s, such as AMD X2 dual-cores or Intel 800/900D-Series dual-Cores (and Extreme Edition), P4 Hyper-threaders, Opterons, Xeons etc...

I have an aging P4 2.8GHz with 512kb L2 cache and 512Mb RAM.
Looking at the CPDN graphic, it tells me that I am getting a WU crunch time of 3.11 seconds/time-step. In the BOINC Manager, I see that the total estimated time to complete this WU is 2845 hours!!!

Can I get below 1s/TS with a fast modern PC?

Does CPDN like fast processors, or does it relish a large L2/L3 cache, or would more, fast RAM help the crunch times?

Regards,

Neil.

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I think there are a few machines around which approach 1 s/ts, such as the AMD FX-57. My Athlon64 3000 (which is the lowest end of that range) produces 1.7s/ts, although I\'ve overclocked it by 40$.

The dual cores will produce a slightly slower s/ts on each model than the equivalent single core, but of course they\'re processing two models at a time. Dual cores are the most efficent processors to get in terms of watts per ts, and usually also $$$ per ts.

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Mike,
Thanks for that. There seems to be a huge price disparity with the X2 dual-cores and the FX57/60 range from AMD.
I can\'t fathom out why anyone would pay nearly £600 for an FX57 which is a single core CPU clocked at 2.8GHz, when you can have a dual-core X2 4400+ for about £325 - the 4400+ is clocked at 2.2GHz, so that\'s 27% slower on clock speed, but you have two cores! L1 & L2 caches are the same.

I\'d like to go for the 4400+ as it seems to offer a good price/performance ratio, and I use my PC for \"Music\" composition, and the AMDs win hands down at the moment when compared to Intel 800D\'s (however, that could change later on this year with the introduction of the Intel \"Conroe\" dual-cores.)

I want to get my CPDN model finished sooner than 2700 hours!!! However, will BOINC see the model and use both CPU cores to effectively run it almost twice the speed or is the CPDN model single threaded, so it won\'t benefit from a dual-core chip? You mention slower s/TS with dual-cores. So could my PC run CPDN on one core and maybe SETI on the other!?!?

Neil.

I think there are a few machines around which approach 1 s/ts, such as the AMD FX-57. My Athlon64 3000 (which is the lowest end of that range) produces 1.7s/ts, although I\'ve overclocked it by 40$.

The dual cores will produce a slightly slower s/ts on each model than the equivalent single core, but of course they\'re processing two models at a time. Dual cores are the most efficent processors to get in terms of watts per ts, and usually also $$$ per ts.

The FX range is unlocked, hence much simpler to overclock. Additionally, it\'s been tested to much higher MHz than the official ratings, so overclocks better.

It has to be said that the entire Athlon64 range does overclock very well. You can pretty much guarantee over 30% overclock on any chip in the range, provided you have a good motherboard with the right options.

The model is single-threaded, but you can run two of them (the throughput is therefore nearly twice as fast on a single-core CPU, but each individual model is a little slower). You can indeed run different projects simultaneously.

The other processor range you might want to include in your consideration is the Opteron 1xx range - this is the same core as the Athlon64 (pin-compatible etc), but in some cases has more cache memory on-chip.

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