general question on speed using quad core Xeons

[Satish Balay]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, amjad ali wrote:

> > The othe CPU side - its balanced by FSB1600 =>
> > Bandwidth = 1600MHz * 8(bytes bus)* 2(CPU-chips) = 25.6GByte/se
> >
> > So generally all the 3 things you've listed has to *match* correctly.
> > [Some CPUs and chipsets support multiple FSB frequencies - so have to
> > check what freq is set for the machine you are buying.]
> 
> Currently I am making a gigabit ethernet cluster of 4 compute nodes
> (totaling 8 cores), with each node having
> One Processor: Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66 GHz Processor, FSB 1333MHz, 4MB L2.
> Motherboard: Intel Entry Server Board Intel S3200SHV with intel 3200 Chipset
> supporting 1333/1066/800 MHz FSB .
> RAM: 2GB DDR2 800MHz ECC System Memory.
> 
> What memory-bandwidth/CPU-core will be there for this system?
> Any other comment/remark?
> My area work deals in sparse matrices.
> I near future I would like to add 12 similar compute nodes in the cluster.

http://www.intel.com/cd/products/services/emea/eng/chipsets/374398.htm
It says 12.8 GB/s for DDR2-800. I think the CPU with 1333 => 10.7GB/s

It would be unbalanced - and I don't know how this will affect
things.. [Perhaps it will perform better than DDR2-677 RAM]

> On such a cluster what if I relapce "C2D 2.66 GHz FSB1333 processor" with
> "Intel Xeon 3070/3075 2.66 GHz FSB1066/1333 processor"? Would there be any
> significant improvement in performance?

I doubt it will make a difference. But this is unproven speculation.

Satish