[ale] Motherboard ?

[Mike Kachline]

	Gary,


> I am going to build a new system, piece by piece, but was wondering if a
> bought a dual processor board can the board run with just one cpu until
> I have the money to by the second processor? If I do have two processors
<snip>
	Gary,

	I bought my dual pentium pro (SuperMicro) MB back when the PPro's
were hot off of the presses and started off with 1 CPU. As the PPros got
cheaper, I finally upgraded to the second CPU. To this day, I have not
been sorry about the purchase of my MB or the two CPUs. In answer to your
question of "can I run only a single CPU", the answer is *probably* yes,
but, I would imagine that this would be MB specific.


<snip>
 > will the computer run all programs and compile programs faster
or dose
> that depend on the program I am running? This will run linux and windows
<snip>

	Do a "ps waux" on your current linux box. This will list all of
the threads and processes which could be allocated to your CPUs.  Instead
of one CPU having to handle the load of all of your processes and threads,
the job can now be divided between two. In the case of compiling, you can
tell "make" to start compiling files, two at a time. Thus, theoretically
at least, you should be able to get almost twice as fast of a compile with
two CPUs than with one.

 I've generally found that having multiple CPU's doesn't speed up the
actual execution of any single program. However, the system *as a whole*
appears to be faster, as, it is more responsive. If you generally run a
lot of different programs at some point in time (or a single program which
uses a whole bunch of threads), then you'll really see the difference
between a uni and multi processor machine. However, if you're hoping to
drop in a second CPU and see a big difference in tasks such as browsing on
netscape (which is single threaded), you won't see much improvement.


 > 98 on a dual 1000mhz (even though I know windows 98
dose not support > dual processors) w/ 256MB ram +.
<snip>
	One other point to note. Try to get as much L2 cache as you can on
your CPU's. I've generally used as a rule of thumb that your cache / N
(where N is the number of CPU's) will equate out to the amount of cache
which is actually usable by your processor. The remainder going to
the task of simply keeping up with what the other CPUs are doing.



				- Mike
======================================
Michael Kachline 
mailto:kachline at brightstar.gt.ed.net
http://brightstar.gt.ed.net/kachline
======================================

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