Difference in performance worth difference in price??

[cdamiker]

All else equal, does anyone have any idea how differently a system with one or two Quad-Core Intel® Xeon®Processor 5400/5300 CPUs would perform relative to using one or two Dual-Core Intel® Xeon®Processor 5200/5100/5000 CPUs for CPU-intensive operations?

 

[EXT64]

It depends on whether that CPU intensive task can go octo thread or only quad thread. If it can do 8 threads, then the quads will cream the duals. If it is not a multithread optimized app, then the duals will be equal or potentially faster (depending on clockspeed).

 

[cdamiker]

Thanks. Other than obviously testing different configurations, can you think of any way to determine if the app uses multiple threads?

 

[cdamiker]

One of the apps I mentioned in a previous post...SlingPlayer. I doubt SlingMedia would be forthcoming with this sort of information. The other app, NinjaTrader, I may be able to find out directly from the designers.

 

[EXT64]

Sometimes they will advertise it, but often the best way to find out is to ask. Many big CPU intensive applications are going Multithread since the performance increase can be huge. Do you have any in mind currently?

 

[EXT64]

Yeah, I'm not familiar with either of those, so unless someone posts that they are you may just have to ask the designers (or google it and see if you can find any forum/articles about those specific programs).

 

[cdamiker]

Also, I notice that on my laptop (with an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9300) SlingPlayer has no delays (though seems to be using about 40-55% of the CPU)

 

[EXT64]

Well, if you are sure that is the only program running, then it sounds like that program is (at least) Dual thread optimized (which is better than a lot of programs). So obviously for it no more than 2 (or 4 to be safe) cores is really necessary.

 

[cdamiker]

My motivation for asking this question was that there are obvious delays running ONLY SlingPlayer on my (home-built) desktop which currently has a Dual Core Xeon, 12GB, nVidia Quadro PCIe X1. On my laptop, there are no delays running SlingPlayer as well as NinjaTrader and other apps! I'd like the desktop to perform as least as well as the laptop. I'm not really familiar with the nuanced differences between these CPUs so not sure if sticking with and upgrading the Xeon processors will help.

 

[EXT64]

What is the processor usage on your home dual core desktop?

 

[cdamiker]

60-70%

I found this post on BigResource....trying to research this further on Intel's website...

Agreed with the above. Q9300 is basically a 5420 with half the CPU Cache, so if you're going for 54xx series, try to aim at 5420 or higher. If the Q9300 will offer considerable savings, just go for that. I don't know how often it's done, but we don't often upgrade
servers by adding a second CPU. It's almost always either there when ordered, or never ordered.

JoseQ

 

[EXT64]

Hmm, that is odd. If it is a dual (or more) threaded app, that processor percentage should be higher (if that was holding it back). Is this application at all graphically complex?

 

[cdamiker]

No. It's simply displaying a HD video stream coming in over my intranet.