I am in the market to upgrade my motherboard and processor (as soon as I have the funds) and I was curious if I would see any benefits from having a dual processor system on my home machine. I searched through the HCL and didn't see much mention of them. I am a computer science graduate student so I program a fair amount and I have some upcoming projects that will likely be fairly computationally intensive. Will I notice the difference? Is it worth the extra money to have that second processor around? and if I don't get two processors, what about the dual-core processors that both AMD and Intel are releasing? I currently run slackware 10.1 and I was also curious if there were any distributions/tweaks that would be especially helpful in taking advantage of a dual processor/dual-core system. Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I felt they were closely intertwined enough not to be deserving of their own threads. Thanks for the help!!

Linux supports SMP pretty well. You'll have to make sure you have SMP enabled in your kernel of course

Multiple processors are not much help on large, monolithic, programs. They can be tremendous help on threaded apps.

Even if you don't go with a multiprocessor machine I'd start looking at making your large, computationally intense, programs as parallel as possible. It appears parallelism is the future.


BTW... I love my dual Opteron I'd recommend one of those bad boys to anyone

SMP is a tremendous help even with those programs, if you multitask - or even if you don't multitask in your desktop environment but have your box handling web and DNS as well as your desktop applications.

Right, What I meant by that is the performance of the monolithic application itself will not increase much (it might increase ever so slightly because it will potentially end up with more time on the CPU). Your absolutely right in saying that overall system performance while that large monolithic app is running will increase since other processes will be able to use the 2nd CPU.