At 12:04 PM 2/3/2006, Mike King - KM0T wrote:
Boy, this would be great for real estate space. A Pent 4 3.4 GHz with a gig of ram should have no problems...especially a HyperThread chip, PowerSDR on each thread?
HT doesn't necessarily give you twice the throughput. In many systems, it's the memory bandwidth that limits you. I believe that both CPU cores share the same Level 1 cache, so if your application is anywhere near 50% utilization, HT might not buy you much. Makes context switches real fast though, and allows clever pipelining schemes (speculative execution of both branches, for instance).
You can go hit the beowulf archives (http://www.beowulf.org/) for a lot of discussion about the value (or not) of HT in highly compute bound applications.
James Lux, P.E. Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group Flight Communications Systems Section Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena CA 91109 tel: (818)354-2075 fax: (818)393-6875
