[mythtv-users] Dual Core or Dual CPU??

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Aug 4 19:04:00 UTC 2007


On Saturday 04 August 2007 11:59, John Drescher wrote:
> > They won't with help much with 1 job to do.  But if you have a 2+ cores,
> > let it run 2+ jobs at the same time.
>
> I found a very important factor is trying to squeeze out more performance
> out of the disk subsystem as a lot of the time while running mytharchive I
> find that even with 4GB of memory my system spends a lot of time waiting
> for io.

Disk I/O is one of the areas where consumer PCs generally fall pretty flat. 
This is at least partially due to the years of buyers judging PCs solely 
on "how many megahertz", an attitude very much encouraged by the CPU and PC 
makers. It's far easier to just by a faster chip and advertise its speed than 
to design a well-integrated high-performance machine. Knowing that most users 
will simply be doing email and web browsing, with absolutely no idea how to 
properly rate a machine's performance, helps a lot. For the "gamers" they 
just put a fast GPU in the box, as all they see is "how many FPS".

Commercial systems, OTOH, are generally rated by composite benchmarks that 
take into account all the systems in a computer, including disk I/O, memory 
performance and the like.

There is absolutely no comparison between even the "best" IDE/UDMA/PATA/SATA 
drive systems and an Ultra-320 SCSI array, especially if you plan on 
accessing more than one drive at a time.

It reminds me of the '60's, when transistor radios were sold on the basis 
of "how many transistors". Some units were sold as "12-transistor radios", 
when an investigation would reveal that only 4 of them were actually wired 
into the circuitry, or that several of them were in fact used only as diodes 
in the battery lead.

-- 
BEWW


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