I'm in the process of upgrading my motherboard/RAM and CPU. I'm opting for an AM3 motherboard with DDR3 RAM (for sake of upgrade longevity). I'm debating between an AMD Phenom II x3 720 CPU and an AMD Athlon II x4 620 CPU. Will Elmer benefit more from (1) a quad-core with no L3 cache [Athlon] or (2) a tri-core with 6 mb of L3 cache [Phenom]. Also, the clock speed of the Athlon is 2.6 GHz while that of the Phenom is 2.8 GHz.
NB: for those on the CAElinux forum, I apologize for cross posting.
L3 cache or quad-core
Re: L3 cache or quad-core
Hi,
Unfortunately there is no extensive data on Elmer's performance on different processor architechtures.
Personally I have very good experiences on Phenom, the performance of which is very close to Opteron.
The equation is not that simple, though. Please note that the speed-up factor of the parallel code is ~N/C, where N is the number of cores or processors, and C is the parallel overhead. In practice, we have something like C=1.5 ... 2. This means that there can be a significant differece between the performance of 2, 3, and 4, cores with respect to the scalar solver.
Unfortunately there is no extensive data on Elmer's performance on different processor architechtures.
Personally I have very good experiences on Phenom, the performance of which is very close to Opteron.
The equation is not that simple, though. Please note that the speed-up factor of the parallel code is ~N/C, where N is the number of cores or processors, and C is the parallel overhead. In practice, we have something like C=1.5 ... 2. This means that there can be a significant differece between the performance of 2, 3, and 4, cores with respect to the scalar solver.