Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[John Haxby]

Robert L Cochran wrote:

> I would like to keep to a budget of about USD $600-700 for a CPU 
> upgrade. I want to both develop and use open source software, which 
> means a lot of code-compile-test cycles. I want the compiles to finish 
> quickly. For example, PHP 6.0 (from snaps.php.net) takes about 4-5 
> minutes to compile on my single core Athlon 64 3500+, and I'd like to 
> cut the compile time in half. I also want to do web development with 
> PHP and databases. I want to be able to keep up with the current  CPUs 
> and get exposure to them.

When you're compiling is your CPU running at 100% (near enough)?   
Chances are it is, in which case you should benefit from an extra CPU so 
long as you run either "make -j2" or "cc -pipe" (or both).  A while back 
when I had an two processor machine for development I found that "cc 
-pipe" ("make -j2" didn't work with the broken build system) cut 
compilation time dramatically and both CPUs were busy instead of just 
one of them.

The other advantage of an dual CPU system, at least for software 
development, was that the autotests found several bugs that  we simply 
hadn't seen before -- every one of them some sort of race condition it 
was easy to trigger when you can have two processes running at the same 
time.

jch