On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 21:43 +0100, Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
Given that a certain simulation job (10,000 rounds) takes 6-8 hours on an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.59GHz machine, what might it take (i.e. what speed factor) on a machine with
a) IntelR CoreT2 Duo E6400 speed factor of 1.265
b) IntelR CoreT2 Duo E6600 speed factor of 1.387
c) IntelR CoreT2 Duo E6700 speed factor of 1.441
:)
Seriously though..there is no way to answer this question without knowing a great deal about the simulation.
In theory clock for clock a single core of a Core2 due may in some circumstances be faster than a P4. But does your simulation thread across SMP machines so can you make full use of the 2nd core ?..or does the machine do other things at the same time or run multiple concurrent instances of the simulation and therefore will benefit anyway ?
Can you recompile the simulation for 64bit arch ? Is it the sort of thing that would benefit from this (or even just benefit from being able to address more ram than the 32bit arch is capable of)
You might see an improvement just because you have more memory bandwidth..DDR2 is up to 1066 Mhz now and dual channel mainboards are the norm. What memory is in your current P4 ?
Alternatively is the simulation portable enough to easily test on someone else's machine, plenty of people (me included) have dual or quad core versions of the processor you are looking at who could benchmark it for you.