HPCC 2008: Glen Lupton’s talk

Glen is with HP. He’s still talking, so I may have more to say, but he just showed an interesting slide comparing dual core and quad core processors on a FLUENT benchmark of varying sizes. For the two largest cases, the quad core processors win. But as the problems get smaller, dual core wins.

But the really interesting feature of the chart was a third bar, representing the benchmarks run on 3 cores of a quad core chip. In this case it’s almost always better in the tested cases to use the three core configuration than the dual core processor. Something to think about if you’re planning an upgrade.