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I have a single-threaded, CPU-bound application that's currently running on a multi-core Windows machine (32-way 2.1GHz Pentium Pro/II/III). It's stuck at 100% of one of the "cores", which equates to about 3% CPU. Unfortunately, the application can't be easily modified or made multi-threaded. We're hitting application performance problems, and it's pretty clear that CPU is the bottleneck.
We have a spec for other hardware, a 2xQuad core Xeon 3GHz machine. But what I don't know is whether this would be a better spec for the application. My immediate instinct is that the clock speed is faster and there are less cores (8 rather than 32) so overall the application would run better. But I'm conscious that it's not that simple, on the 32-way machine lots of those "cores" are hyper-threading and I don't know whether simple-minded calculations apply.
I'm just looking for a rough "rule of thumb" approach to take in evaluating the 2 machines. I know that to get a true answer, I'd need to do proper tests, but I don't want to spend the time and effort doing so if it's unlikely to help.
I'm also sure there's better hardware/options available out there. Just not ones that we have access to right now, sadly :-(
1I'd suspect a relatively modern xeon would do better, considering all three possible and different processor architectures in play on the '32 way' system. What's the hardware, really? – Journeyman Geek – 2016-01-26T13:28:48.667
1Actually, did PIIIs even run that fast? Yeah, not really enough information to answer, and what we have is a bit suspect. I'm curious to what the multicore beast is tho – Journeyman Geek – 2016-01-26T13:31:48.137
@JourneymanGeek: No, they didn't. They also didn't have hyper-threading. – qasdfdsaq – 2016-01-26T13:41:27.320
The big problem is that I don't know any hardware details. And I don't want to get sucked into big evaluations if it's (relatively) obvious it's pointless. But if "you can't tell" is the answer, then that's fine, I'll just have to go with that. – Paul Moore – 2016-01-26T13:41:56.677
Big evaluations, no. Going to "Control Panel, System" and looking at the processor would be a big help. – Journeyman Geek – 2016-01-26T13:48:11.040
Sorry - the PIII info came from a desktop wallpaper thing (I think it's BGinfo from Systems Internals). Looks like it's inaccurate. I should have checked control panel, which says Intel Xeon CPU E7-4830 @2.13GHz. Sadly for the other one all I have is basically what I quoted - I found a bit more that says it's an E5450. But that's from a document and I have no access to the machine. Apologies for the limited info - I'm a software guy and don't really know how the various CPU types relate to each other. – Paul Moore – 2016-01-26T13:57:40.097
The E5450 is a very old processor from 2007 and unlikely to be of any benefit. It's based on older architecture and numbering. Thankfully, newer models are more sensibly differentiated - Xeon E3-1234 v1, v2, v3, v4, etc. – qasdfdsaq – 2016-01-26T14:31:00.703