|
|
Registered User
Currently Offline
|
Posts: 11
Join Date: Oct 2009
|
Hello
One question still plagues many IT folks: Are the extra cores worth the extra money? As of this moment, the newest quad-core processors cost north of $1,000—and while prices on multi-core processors are sure to come down, they're going to remain at a premium for a long time to come. So if you're budgeting out for new systems, you want to have some idea of whether two cores are worth the extra bucks.
Processor resources
Visualization education a VAR must-have
Windows Vista hardware: Investing now or later
The primary factor to consider is what the hardware is going to be used for, i.e., the application load and the user base. Multi-core systems thrive most when they're fed highly multithreaded, parallelism applications—programs that can split their workload off among multiple CPUs. Such applications include:
* Databases. This encompasses everything from desktop programs such as Access or File Maker Pro to SQL Server, Sybase and MySQL. All of them work better when they have more CPUs to run on.
* Multimedia. This includes video editing suites, audio workstations, Photoshop, 3D rendering, CAD and Flash. Most multimedia programs run in a highly parallel, multithreaded fashion. However, there are a few exceptions—some kinds of video encoding (e.g., QuickTime) that aren't as heavily optimized for multithreading and can't always be.
__________________
|
