anyone tried dual core processors yet??

[chesterfield]

well, i have and just want to hear any feed back. anybody notice an improvement by upgrading from a hyperthreading processor to dual core?? i.e 3.2 LGA775 Prescott to either a 2.8 or 3.0 Dual Core Pressler....anyone notice any advantages, disadvantages????

just looking for feed back......

[thevoelk]

I have a Pentium D at work, amazingly fast when running things like AutoCAD, Canopus Procoder, and Avid Express. Of course, it may be the 4GB of RAM in it also.

I also have a new Core Duo laptop on order from Dell to replace may aging Latitude D810. A co-worker ordered one for his son, and he was running DVD Shrink. I can't remember the time, but it was something like 8 minutes to shrink Lord of the Rings after it was ripped to the hard drive.

[handyguy]

Things should be twice as fast, but only if the software supports dual processors.

I don't know if dvdshrink does.

[thevoelk]

It doesn't, but you can set shrink to use one of the processors, and everything else (more or less) on the other. So you basically can give almost 100% of the CPU to Shrink, without other apps and services slowing it down. I probably should have clarified that. I will say they don't seem twice as fast, but it's a tricky comparison to make.

[jagabo]

TMPGEnc Plus encodes more than twice as fast (2 cores vs 1) with my Athlon 64 X2 3800+.

[lenti_75]

so far only SOME aplications can take advantage of dual core

I got a Intel 860 and don;t see that much improvement over the Athlon XP, maybe, when vista with 64 bit support and dual core support for all aplications, we'll see that speed, but for now, moslty is just 20-30% faster than an single core.

and BTW.....Procoder is not that fast, is about 15% faster than my old Athlon xp and a got 1,5G ram dual channel , which doesn;t matter, you moslty use about 500-1Gb anyway, those 3 Gb are just a waiste.

do something, and take a look at your mem usage, and it's below 1 Gb no matter what you do

[chesterfield]

ok, dumb question, how does one set shrink to use only on processor??? or how can you dedicate one processor to do certian apps, and vice cersa???

[jagabo]

When I had the free trial of Cinemacraft Encoder installed it ran about 70 percent faster with two cores.

I wouldn't buy a computer without dual core now. Except maybe a dedicated gaming (few games are multithreaded) or silent computer.

Oh, here's a good review of the cheapest (~US$135) Pentium D CPU:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2736

[ofbarea]

Over a month ago I upgraded my system from a P4-E 3GHz (Intel 856G mobo) to a Pentium D 920 (VIA PT880 Pro mobo) overclocked to 3 GHz. Since I’m using an ARock 775Dual-880Pro motherboard, I did my upgrade re-using my old DDR1 memory and my old ATI AIW 8500DV. I also managed to use my old window XP SP installation (I did not reinstalled windows XP in this machine after the mobo swap).

I ended using almost the same old hardware and the same windows installation, patches and applications. Of course due the mobo change I had to remove old intel chipset drivers and replace them with Via ones. I had to reinstall the drivers for the creative sound card, Intel Gigabit network Card and ATI AIW video card. Besides that nothing changed much.

After the upgrade My system does feel more responsive. Under heavy load my mouse does not slow down anymore, before it did.

I think windows boot time was reduced by a few seconds. It is important to mention that TMPGEnc performance improved a lot. It is not twice as fast, but far better than before.

Last week I upgraded my memory from 512 KB DDR CAS 2.5 to 2GB DDR2 CAS4, I can confirm a couple of thing. Maybe it is a chipset thing but the increased memory bandwidth does not improve TMPGEnc rendering times by much. I can also confirm that memory above 1GB is barely used, yet this extra memory is very useful when manipulating huge photos in Adobe Photoshop.

With this upgrade I had to compromise.

I did not really wanted to buy a new video card and originally I did not intended to buy new memory or new power supply. Therefore I buy this ASRock board and I paid around $65 for it.

This mobo does lack several high end features, but I already had the expansion cards I needed. Also if I ever need to exchange my video card I will have the option to get a PCIe one. Finally the Via chipset has lower performance than current Intel, ATI or Nvidia based mobos.

If you do not follow my cheap upgrade approach you will need a new complete machine for the upgrade.

* New CPU
* A new mobo
* A new power supply needed for the new mobo
* New memory
* And new PCIe video card.

[hrlslcbr]

ok, dumb question, how does one set shrink to use only on processor??? or how can you dedicate one processor to do certian apps, and vice cersa???

Task manager, processes, right-click the process (dvd shrink 3.2.exe), 'Set Affinity', and select how many cores/processors you want it to use.

[wayne421]

Interesting read over at Anand's place about lower-clocked dual core vs. higher clocked single core:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2736

[chesterfield]

@ wayne421

very good link, it looks like going with a dual core processor is THE WAY TO GO these days!!!!!

[MJA]

if you are going the AMD route.wait for the socket AM2 .I think its ganna be out in may

[rallynavvie]

it looks like going with a dual core processor is THE WAY TO GO these days!!!!!

I wouldn't look to them just yet, wait until there is more SMP support in applications to take advantage of the architecture. I've been working with "dual cores" for several years now so I'm all too familiar with the few advantages they offer and a LOT of the misconceptions about them.

Check out this exhaustive thread on dual-core processors in general (though the thread was supposed to be about the cheap Pentium D offering):
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=296451

[handyguy]

"it looks like going with a dual core processor is THE WAY TO GO these days!!!!!"

2 processor computers have been around for a really long time. They aren't a new idea. But as usual, one must have software that uses them to get the benefit.

[xxiangg]

I bought a Intel D805 (dual core/2.66G) a couple of weeks ago.
Run a few tests, comparing with my 1.5 years old Intel 2.4G
machine. I would say that I feel it do not see any significant
benefit for dual core. It actually may have some disadvantage.

An example tests I ran is using virtualdup to do converting
of 1080i HDTV program to 480i AVI using PicVideo codec. I
recorded 4 tests data. (1) Single job on 2.4G intel.
(2) Single job on D805. (3) Three jobs on D805. (4) Single
job on D805, starting with 3 jobs. The data is converting
speed of "frames per second".

Single Single Three Single
job 4.2G job D805 jobs D805 job D805(starts with 3 jobs)

11fps 13fps 6fps 6fps

From (2), it looks like D805 works just like a single core
2.66G intel. This is OK. Just there is no advantage for D805.

From (3), it looks like D805 will slow down when there are
multiple jobs running. It is also OK.

My problem is for (4). When I started with 3 jobs, it was
slow, which was excepted. But when 2 of the 3 jobs finished,
I would except the single job would catch up its speed, but
it never happened. It just stayed there at low speed forever.
This behavior probably is worse than a single core chip.
(BTW, the three jobs I started are virdualdup converting,
a big file copying through an ethernet, and watching HDTV
show on the computer).

From the price point of view, I believe I spent about $160
for 2.4G intel (CPU+MB) 1.5 years ago. I spent about $150
for D805 (CPU+MB). Normally, I believe I coult get a significant
performance boost with about the same amount money after a year
and half. But it is not the case this time. Although D805 is
no worse than a single core chip if you treat it as a single
core chip. But I really see no obvious advantage there.

[xxiangg]

I am sorry that I copied my post here and messed up the data formating.

The test data is

(1) Single job on 2.4G: 11fps.
(2) Single job on D805: 13fps.
(3) Three jobs on D805: 6fps.
(4) Single job on D805, starting with 3 jobs: 6fps.

[ROF]

Buying an 805 and expecting to get great performance is like buying a Duron and expecting Opteron performance. There is a reason why there is a significant price difference between the 805 and the 820. Your tests prove this. For what you pay for an 805 you can buy a single core Opteron 144 and get a better computing experience with the same L2 Cache, twice as much L1, and double your FSB.

[jagabo]

For what you pay for an 805 you can buy a single core Opteron 144 and get a better computing experience with the same L2 Cache, twice as much L1, and double your FSB.

That single Opteron 144 would have cost more than his PD 805 and the motherboard added together. It would have performed comparably (with the test he ran) to the system he replaced. Whereas he reports getting more than a 60 percent increase in throughput (3*6 fps vs 11 fps) with his 805.

[jagabo]

From the price point of view, I believe I spent about $160
for 2.4G intel (CPU+MB) 1.5 years ago. I spent about $150
for D805 (CPU+MB). Normally, I believe I coult get a significant
performance boost with about the same amount money after a year
and half. But it is not the case this time. Although D805 is
no worse than a single core chip if you treat it as a single
core chip. But I really see no obvious advantage there.

Try using Divx or TMPGenc instead. Both are multithreaded and run much faster with dual core processors.

[xxiangg]

For what you pay for an 805 you can buy a single core Opteron 144 and get a better computing experience with the same L2 Cache, twice as much L1, and double your FSB.

That single Opteron 144 would have cost more than his PD 805 and the motherboard added together. It would have performed comparably to the system he replaced. Whereas he reports getting more than a 60 percent increase in throughput (3*6 fps vs 11 fps) with his 805.

Well, I would not use 3*6fps as performance gain. Because not all three jobs are the same
job of video converting. One of the job is copy through ethernet, which normally does not
take too much CPU resources. But my really problem is that once other jobs are done
and one of the jobs is running, the running job does not utilize resources released from
other jobs. I actually get a better performance by killing the running job and restart it if
it is not half way yet. It could be a problem of the OS/software. But I deal them as
a package. If OS/software does not support dual core well, then there is no advantage for
dual core.

[jagabo]

[quote="xxiangg"]

But my really problem is that once other jobs are done and one of the jobs is running, the running job does not utilize resources released from other jobs. I actually get a better performance by killing the running job and restart it if it is not half way yet.

I've never seen anything like that happen on my Athlon 64 X2 3800+. The remaining process always pops right back up to "normal" speed.

[ofbarea]

Multithreaded applications will be the norm eventually. For example WinRAR 3.60 beta 1 adds support for multicore machines.

[terjeber]

I upgraded my computer from a Pentium running at 2.4GHz to an AMD-based system with the 4400 X2, two cores running at 2.2GHz. I had to get new memory, which was faster, but most other things at first stayed the same. The AMD is faster clock-for clock than the Pentium, and I did get faster RAM so I figured I'd get at least a 2x speed increase.

Note, going from 1 to 2 CPUs, all other things held contstant, will never bet you twice the performance under any circumstance. There will be extra CPU cycles needed to manage two threads, one for each CPU, so even under ideal situations, two of the same core will perform slightly less than twice as fast ast one.

Now, what happened to the speed of my work? Well, I had done some tests in Vegas Video with rendering a movie (of some length) to MPEG-2 before switching over. The average render time for 5 runs was 1 hour 19 minutes with Vegas. I ran the same test on my new AMD, and the average render time was 18 minutes. The significant increase in speed was caused by the better CPU design of AMD, coupled with more on-chip cache and faster memory, but I was still stunned.

You should be able to see how well your particular application performs by just monitoring the task as it is running. The Vegas MPEG encoder when running will normally keep both my CPUs running between 99 and 100%. This is good, it means that software engineers have designed the software to be able to make full use of the dual core. I also have the latest version of TMPEGEnc, which is also multi-threaded and ablet o take advantage of dual cores. When encoding with TMPEGEnc, my CPUs rarely reach 80% utilization, mostly hanging around 70% each. This means that the Tsunami engineers have not been able to create a threading system that is fully able to make use of two CPUs.

With the price of a dual core CPU where it is, and considering the fact that we all run several applications simulatneously all the time (Windows XP has a ton of apps running just when it starts) we can all take some advantage of two CPUs. Also remember that simple disk access on any PC that isn't running SCSI disks takes a good bit of CPU. You have noticed this some times when your computer slows down noticeably when doing some heavy disk-bound task.

If you are using your computer for browsing and email, you will not notice a lot of speed up, if you use it for games mostly, same thing, but that will probably change with games coming out this year. If you use it for foto or video editing and encoding, you will notice a significant speed increase in almost all instances.

[genki500]

Different takes on this dual core thing. I edit quite a few video. I want it fast, however, it works better having multiple fast machines than just one fastest machine. Imagining this, after 1st video editing is done, rendering video -- get on 2rd machine, editing 2nd video, rendering video -- come back to 1st machine, burn DVD -- get on to 3rd machine....

Dual core is great, but my money is wiser spent on multiple machines.

[Faustus]

My Macbook Pro has one of the dual core Processors. I run it in both OSX and Windows. Its quite awesome.

[jagabo]

Note, going from 1 to 2 CPUs, all other things held contstant, will never bet you twice the performance under any circumstance.

There are cases where you can get more than twice the performance. Two CPUs can (depending on design) have twice as much cache. If a problem is such that the working set is a little too big to fit in one CPU's cache, but can be split so that each CPU get's half the data, then cache thrashing can be avoided and you can get more than twice the performance.

I also have the latest version of TMPEGEnc, which is also multi-threaded and ablet o take advantage of dual cores. When encoding with TMPEGEnc, my CPUs rarely reach 80% utilization, mostly hanging around 70% each.

That has not been my experience on an A64 X2 3800+ and TMPGEnc 2.5x. I almost always see both CPU's over 90%, especially with motion search precision at Normal or above (with DV, MPEG2 or MPEG4 sources). I suspect that with uncompressed RGB, or maybe HuffYUV encoded YUY2, as the source the program might become starved for data. I usually see more than double the performance with both cores enabled. Although this can vary depending on the settings and the source video.

[rallynavvie]

Note, going from 1 to 2 CPUs, all other things held contstant, will never bet you twice the performance under any circumstance.

There are cases where you can get more than twice the performance. Two CPUs can (depending on design) have twice as much cache. If a problem is such that the working set is a little too big to fit in one CPU's cache, but can be split so that each CPU get's half the data, then cache thrashing can be avoided and you can get more than twice the performance.

Never in life, my friend. What you are experiencing is due to something else not remaining constant between a single and a second processor. Go over to 2CPU.com and claim better than double the performance with a dual-core processor and see what sort of response it gets. I have three SMP workstations now and none of them even approach double the performance of leaving only a single CPU in any of them, and being that there are two physically seperate CPUs in those machines they each have their own memory bus, their own independent caches (at all levels), and chipsets designed to take advantage of these benefits. Normally you'll be lucky to see a 70% increase in performance over the single chip on SMP-aware applications.