two CPU's?

Quote from Holmes:

You may speak for yourself but you are most definitely not speaking for me.

I have a 20 year + IT career behind me and I do know how to tune a PC, thank you. (Once I finish tuning the setup is at least twice, if not three times as fast as the standard XP installation).

Hope you do not make the same generalisations when you try to trade: the devil is in the details.

Holmes
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Holmes , is there a tutorial linked somewhere you recommend? I had no idea such gains were available.
 
Quote from lilboy716:

sure, facts:

Simultaneous Multithreading: Maximizing On-Chip Parallelism (1995) (Make Corrections) (247 citations)
Dean Tullsen, Susan J. Eggers, Henry M. Levy
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/p...ilpzSztullsen95.pdf/tullsen95simultaneous.pdf

this is your pentium 4 hyperthreading.. hyperthreading is a marketing term... but the basics are laid out here. in 1995


The Case for a Single-Chip Multiprocessor

http://ogun.stanford.edu/~kunle/publications/hydra_ASPLOS_VII.pdf


this is the case for duo core, quad core, in 1996




Piranha: A Scalable Architecture Based on Single-Chip Multiprocessing (2000)

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/p...zSzDatabasezSzisca00.pdf/barroso00piranha.pdf


this is your 4x4, or Core 2 Duo... of course the commerical versions are more advanced... and piranha got cancelled i believe (not sure). this paper talks about what they attempted to do, in 2000


and this is the very promising "future" of CPU design

Transactional Memory Coherence and Consistency

http://tcc.stanford.edu/publications/tcc_isca2004.pdf


database transaction style memory accesses
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You only supplied "SOFT" facts. Still waiting.
 
Quote from biologymajor:

Why would a trader require 2 CPU's in their computer? I hear that some traders have two CPU's in their one computer? Why?
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There is a lot of misinformation in this series of posts. I would say that the common reason that a trader has more than one processor is that they are misinformed. The majority of performance problems can be attributed to poorly written software. If the software is poorly written, a second processor will probably do little to speed improve performance. Multiple processors make sense when you may have two independent CPU-intensive threads operating on independent data simultaneously. Whenever these threads share a common resource there is a deadlock where one operation must wait on the other to complete. This implies that there must be a way for separate programs to operate on a common resource without stepping on one another. In software engineering terminology this is referred to as "locking". Locking is itself a CPU intensive operation, meaning that there is an overhead associated with multiprocessing. The locking overhead is associated with the frequency of common data access by the respective threads. Depending on the software and operating system, there might be no performance improvement as a result of having parallel processors. Even worse, performance could actually decrease as a result of locking. This does not even scratch the surface, but it should be sufficient to say that the majority of trader workstations will not benefit from multiple processors. To benefit, the software needs to be carefully designed to take advantage of the additional processors. Even then, there are operating constraints that must be accounted for to ensure performance. The bottom line is, "save your money". If you have totally separate applications, consider purchasing a second system instead of a second CPU.

-segv
 
LOL. Guys.

He may have software issues but he probably can't fix them anyway.

He will benefit by increasing ram if hes under 512k but if his system is near antique now and his trading apps have continued to get hungrier he will also benefit by a new processor/motherboard.

And given the price of mid range Core 2 Duo's he might as well get one. If I was buying a new system or needed to upgrade more than a cpu my pathetic motherboard could support I'd get one. Anyone who thinks the new processors won't improve performance of trading application suites is probably deliberately hanging onto their nonsense: tomshardware and anandtech tests should convince all but the most obtuse.

PS. Holmes, If you can really make a trading system running on XP run three times as fast (I'll take twice) then how about proving it to us and benefiting everyone by setting up a thread to show how. I think 2-3x is an exaggeration but would always cheerfully take 1.5x
 
Quote from segv:

There is a lot of misinformation in this series of posts. I would say that the common reason that a trader has more than one processor is that they are misinformed. The majority of performance problems can be attributed to poorly written software. If the software is poorly written, a second processor will probably do little to speed improve performance. Multiple processors make sense when you may have two independent CPU-intensive threads operating on independent data simultaneously. Whenever these threads share a common resource there is a deadlock where one operation must wait on the other to complete. This implies that there must be a way for separate programs to operate on a common resource without stepping on one another. In software engineering terminology this is referred to as "locking". Locking is itself a CPU intensive operation, meaning that there is an overhead associated with multiprocessing. The locking overhead is associated with the frequency of common data access by the respective threads. Depending on the software and operating system, there might be no performance improvement as a result of having parallel processors. Even worse, performance could actually decrease as a result of locking. This does not even scratch the surface, but it should be sufficient to say that the majority of trader workstations will not benefit from multiple processors. To benefit, the software needs to be carefully designed to take advantage of the additional processors. Even then, there are operating constraints that must be accounted for to ensure performance. The bottom line is, "save your money". If you have totally separate applications, consider purchasing a second system instead of a second CPU.

-segv
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As an example, the price differene between a dual core AMD 4200+ x2 and a single core 3500+ is about $100. Clock speed is the same in the two chips. The situation is similiar with Intel. It doesn't make sense to not get dual core in a new machine. At this price, why not ?

I'm quite aware that there are overheads with multiprocessor machines, not only in multithreaded applications, but also at the hardware and operating system levels. I do full well understand the issues. I was developing multithreaded high performance C++ code on muliprocessor Suns six years ago. It was not exactly bleeding edge then.

As long as one does not expect some randomly chosen piece of software to double in speed on a dual core box then there won't be disappointment. For multiple simultaneous applications, in most cases there will be clear performance benefits.
 
Quote from kiwi_trader:

LMAO nononsense.

Amusing to choose that name and then spend thousands of posts spouting nonsense. You're either completely thick or it just makes you feel good.
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ROFLMAO x 10^23 :D
 
Quote from kiwi_trader:

He will benefit by increasing ram if hes under 512k but if his system is near antique now and his trading apps have continued to get hungrier he will also benefit by a new processor/motherboard.

And given the price of mid range Core 2 Duo's he might as well get one. If I was buying a new system or needed to upgrade more than a cpu my pathetic motherboard could support I'd get one. Anyone who thinks the new processors won't improve performance of trading application suites is probably deliberately hanging onto their nonsense: tomshardware and anandtech tests should convince all but the most obtuse.
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There isn't a single statement in Kiwi's post that I disagree with. Well said.
 
Quote from nononsense:

congratulations lizer,
must have cost you a lot of dumb sweat to come up with this one!
:cool:
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Not as much as it cost you no-sense. Hee hee hee, once again typical response. Don't forget your medication Grampa :D
 
Quote from nononsense:

congratulations lizer,
must have cost you a lot of dumb sweat to come up with this one!
:cool:
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No, just a reference to Avogodro's Number.
 
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