HT vs smp.

[jmlxg]

Is hyper-threading faster or is dual processors faster in gentoo?

I am thinking of buying Two Athlon XP-M's at 1800+ PR Rating and overclocking them to 2250 which is 2800+ PR Rating. I know that my mobo the MSI K7D Master will need some kind of speical bios to help it use mobile processors. Question with that is will it work with gentoo?

I don't trust intel because of their somewhat moderate performance to price ratio althougth their memeory bandwidth is much higher. Is 2.6.13 kernel is buugy because it looks like a good kernel to use to for right now i will just use the nitro sources with 2.6.12.

Oh and by the way which nvidia Graphics card should i get if i am on a bugdet and what card should i get if i have a moderate amount to spend?

Oh and to all of you who do not think that gentoo is just about the fastest linux distro out there you are proved wrong once again because even with gentoo-sources i got 100% and no frameskip on VisualBoyAdvance. Try that with any of the leading distros on a Duron 1100 with 512 Ram and fast hardrive i only get 86# with frameskip 0. So their is a real difference there.

Thanks,

jmlxg

[Jake]

Sometimes HT CPUs perform better with HT disabled. It only benefits multitasking performance (mostly a hack for Windows) and applications that don't use the whole CPU with a single thread. Since HT just fakes a second CPU, a real second CPU would be better. Multiple processors do have a disadvantage, however. If your application isn't multithreaded, one CPU will remain mostly idle. Sure it can handle OS stuff, but you'd be better off with one CPU twice as fast for some usage patterns.

Why would you run dual Athlon XP-Ms? If you're going to buy a new mobo anyway, get an Athlon 64. Socket 939 is the way to go these days, but I'm sure you could build a dirt cheap socket 754 system. The Athlon 64 also overclocks well if you get the right core.