Well, yesterday I was thinking whether dual core CPUs are better or dual single core CPUs are better ? I’m thinking from the Intel’s perspective, since I’ve only Intel stuff, though its my dream to try out other manufacturer’s hardware also ;-). So then I called Gautam, and like me he also suggested that dual single core CPUs perform better than single dual core CPU. Why, I’m thinking so because dual core CPUs just have two execution engines ( as compared to, two architectural states on top of single execution engine in case of hyper-threading technology ), but share the same FSB, so if two cores are executing tasks which require memory (not present in CPU caches), which means both cores require simultaneous memory access, and is not possible, so one core has to stall.
Anyways, I posted this to comp.arch Usenet newsgroup, and there somebody reminded me that AMD has also gone Multicore. Then I came to know about HyperTransport, and its NUMA kind of technology.
From the discussion, I’d there I concluded that Dual Core CPUs should be preferred in HyperTransport based systems, and in Shared FSB based systems Dual Single Core CPUs should be preferred. You can read that discussion for more information.
Thanks to Mayank, I got introduced to 2 new terms: CMP, and SMT.
