Quote from: Tangled-Universe on April 22, 2010, 03:39:51 PM
....is there anything known about price/performance of these hexacores compared to intel's hexacores/top quadcore?
Some of it is still speculation but prices should be in the range $195 to $295 and performance
should scale pretty linearly with the number of cores, say 50% faster than a quad-core, for
multi-thread enabled apps such as TG2. Thuban is supposed to have some hyper-threading
that Deneb lacks. I expect individual threads might run a few percent faster. However, having
more cores will probably be offset in light of the way TG2 does its multi-threading for animation.
If the final thread for a frame takes a lot longer than the others, all of the other threads will be
idling until the last one is finished before starting the next frame. Oshyan tells me that this
should be addressed in the future.
So a Thuban should compare pretty well with an i7 quad-core when the software does multi-threading
well. But for single thread apps, I expect a high end i7 is still king of the hill. Phenom still seems to
beat i7 for I/O intensive apps. However, TG2 is very compute-bound so an i7 is the best you
can do when you need single threads to run fast. The pre-render window in TG2 seems to use
only one thread so more threads are not going to help speed this process up. But final renders
will benefit.
One way I have found that you can keep all cores busy on a single animation render
is to run more than one instance of TG2 using the same scene. Divide the frames and cores
equally between the instances and it should keep all of the cores at 100% utilization. Here is
an example of the benefit provided by having 8GB or more of RAM running on a 64-bit OS such
as Windows 7 even though TG2 is only a 32-bit app.
