AMD dual core vs Intel core 2 quad
In the last few days I asked advice about upgrading from a 2-way Tyan
motherboard Thunder K8WES2895 with two series-2xx AMD dual core opteron to a
4-way motherboard. I learned from both Lennart Sorensen and Daniel Tryba that I
can't use my series 2xx and should buy series 8xx. The price for such system is
largely beyond what I can afford for private use.
I am wondering about abandoning totally my present system of dual opteron,
saving the disks, power supply, and, most important, the 24 GB of Kingston
KRV400D4R3A (184 pin) memories.
Abandoning to change to Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 or 6800. The price is
attractive and the choice of motherboard is wider, possibly up to a 8-way
system (hopefully the 184-pon slots can be used). How does such Intel core 2
compare with dual core opteron in terms of number of independent cpus? To be
specific: when I run molecular dynamics (MD) on Debian amd64 with my shared
memory Thunder with 2 AMD dual core, parallelization support OpenMPI
(everything compiled with Intel ifort/icc), the MD program sees 4 cpus and "top
-i" indicates four cpu at work. The gain with respect to running MD in serial
mode is about threefold, i.e. the parallelization is not bad at all. What can I
expect - from this viewpoint - with four Intel Core 2 quad?
(Compilation of the Forthran MD program with Intel gives a tremendous burst
with respect to GNU Fortran compilers)
Thanks
francesco pietra
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