Six cores on their way

Glenn · May 18, 2011, 18:32:15

Quote from: Rik on May 18, 2011, 18:16:51
Wouldn't they have been delivered by rocket?

Maybe, but it's a poor service, they all exploded.

Rik · May 18, 2011, 18:33:44

A bit like me after baked beans.

Glenn · May 18, 2011, 18:35:12

or a

if it delivers in the correct direction.

Rik · May 18, 2011, 18:35:46

I have a steady aim...

psp83 · May 18, 2011, 23:24:57

For my main box I run a i7 & 8gb RAM (soon to be 12gb) and it runs several VM's fine with no slow down or problems.

I was thinking about getting another box running AMD, let me know how you get on with it gizmo71.

Technical Ben · May 21, 2011, 12:44:23

I got AMD overdrive working the way I wanted. Had a sudden realisation of what I was doing wrong, so reinstalled it.
I have to manually set the options, but now, when I open up the programs, it clocks to that program.
So I have set my single core software (old programs and stuff) to overclock one core, and underclock the others.
For the programs that use all cores, I have all cores running at normal speed. This way, I'm not pushing the cores when they are not even being used. Then Cool n Quiet turns the CPU down to 800mhz when the pc is not in use. Sleep mode kicks in when I leave the pc all together.

The helpful thing is, the program allows me to set "processor affinity". With windows 7 it's a bit hit and miss, so it's good to be able to save the settings for permanent.

[edit]
Nope. Still hitting a road block.
I cannot have both a standard overclock, and a program setting. So if I exit the program, my entire system goes back to default settings. Hmmm...
Seems the program works fine on install. On a system reboot, all the settings go wierd. Lost temp settings, lost overclock settings. It is all there, I just cannot change it now. Stupid software!

(Double edit)
Seems it needs admin privileges, but did not ask for it! So, it was not saving the details (Win 7 AUC stopping it). Now it's back to keeping the settings!

gizmo71 · May 21, 2011, 17:29:24

I have UAC turned off by group policy.

Technical Ben · May 21, 2011, 17:37:48

The software is still causing me a headache. Getting BSOD now it's installed. might remove it again.

FritzBox · May 21, 2011, 20:22:18

Did read somewhere, think it was PC Pro, that ten cores were on it's way

gizmo71 · May 22, 2011, 09:46:51

Quote from: FritzBox on May 21, 2011, 20:22:18
Did read somewhere, think it was PC Pro, that ten cores were on it's way

They're already here; Xeon E7s have 10, and AMD do some Opterons with 12.

Technical Ben · May 22, 2011, 10:08:15

You can't possible need more than 12 cores.

Rik · May 22, 2011, 10:16:58

They said that about 1MB of memory once.

Technical Ben · May 22, 2011, 12:37:38

You mean 128k was not enough?!

Rik · May 22, 2011, 15:17:18

I can remember when 32k was a luxury.

gizmo71 · May 22, 2011, 15:46:10

Quote from: Rik on May 22, 2011, 10:16:58
They said that about 1MB of memory once.

640K. And it was Bill Gates... but he never actually said it. What he did say about it later was nearly as interesting - and says a lot about how poor the computing industry is at predicting its own future:

Quote from: Bill Gates, 1989I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

gizmo71 · May 23, 2011, 20:19:46

Well, after a week of soak testing I've started to migrate real data onto the new server. Been through the Small Business Server migration guide and I'm thinking maybe I'll give that a proper go next weekend, after which I can decommission the old server (which will then get rebuilt as a replacement for my mum's ancient and unreliable Pentium 4 box).

It seems to have settled down to around 45W at idle, which I'm just blown away by. One thing I've noticed is that the Intel chips can only throttle clock speed at the whole chip level (caveat shutting whole cores down to do the turbo trick), whereas the AMDs can throttle per core which must make them more efficient under low loads.

Technical Ben · May 23, 2011, 23:36:44

Yep. Percore is great. I've been running a little sim game from an independent developer. It is only coded for 1 core. So I run 3 at 2ghz, and 1 at 3.4GHz! Runs at 45c.

Else I can oc all or half the cores if it's a multi core program.

I have no idea if you could set it for 1 core on each program. IE, for each VM clock the CPU at default. Actually, that idea is rubbish if your VMs can use multithreads anyhow.

gizmo71 · Jun 16, 2011, 12:22:24

Well it's been in live use for over three weeks now and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

If anything, the huge jump in CPU power over my old server has shown up how weak those laptop drivers are - even with two of them striped together for the majority of the virtual machine virtual drives they're very obviously the bottleneck 99% of the time. If only WD made a 750GB VelociRaptor - the largest at 600GB is just a fraction too small to migrate the whole kit and caboodle onto it, and two will push the power consumption up by 6+ watts which in a 24/7 machine isn't worth it when performance isn't critical.