hehe, how bout a faster spider solitare? WOO HOO!

You can actually get an 8-way dual core Opteron system. It starts at $22k. Which is still less than an Avid.

one vendor

THAT'S A RENDER FARM ALL ON ITS OWN!!!!

HOLY CRAP!!!

so..... Who's gonna buy me one :)

Dave

Just wait for the Sony Play Station 3. 9 cores, 8 available for multitasking.

probably less than $500. Due in 3 months?

I heard that i was the perosn who had the most posts on the forum in one day (today) so all you guys were gonna chip in and buy me one. Can this be true?!

yea - just write me at

Frigid ND Editing
Dream On Way
You Wish, NY 55555-5555

or call me at

800-DREAMON - That's - 800-3732-666

and say you're calling in regards to the - I posted more than you giveaway

:)

it's been stated that both the X360 & PS3 with all their CPU wonders are still a lot slower then multicore/cpu PC's. But it's $500 (RIP OFF!).

I'm not 100% sure but I belive I've actuatly seen a quad-CPU duel core last august. I forget if it was duel core or not (I belive it was) but it was a custom design in a custom case.

made me want one though. :)

Frigid,

I just got back from the post office and the envelope is on the way. Your not gonna pay me in monopoly money are ya? That was done to me once before, and it hurt.

:)

That's a lot of juice in those boxes. However, I believe, they're Linux-only and that WXP won't run on the dual, dual-core machines. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me...

I could be wrong, but I believe XP64 will run quad cores. I know an audio DAW builder getting one to test, or at least trying to - dual quad core system. What would be nice is if they were 940 socket compatible, but they aren't - new socket, motherboard, etc. However, with PCIe for video and audio streaming (separate busses I hope), we could run a full surround audio mix with hi def video without the beast breaking a sweat. Pretty sweet. I'm guessing they won't break $1000 a chip for a while though.

Pretty certian that WXP will run dual duals - the BOXX 7400 is a dual dual-core and was being used by the VASST team on the HDV tour.

I'm almost certain that was on WXP - and they were able to utilize all of that power.

Dave

WinXPPro is limited to 4 cores. Anything higher you need Linux/Unix (and opteron's support 8 duel cores so.... :) )

> Just wait for the Sony Play Station 3. 9 cores, 8 available for multitasking.

While the IBM Cell processor is capable of 9 cores (a single main processor with up to 8 co-processors on a single chip), it is my understanding that the one used by the Playstation 3 will have only 3 cores. It’s still a pretty beefy processor.

> it's been stated that both the X360 & PS3 with all their CPU wonders are still a lot slower then multicore/cpu PC's

Actually, that’s not a fair statement and not entirely true. The co-processors on a Cell (i.e., the Synergistic Processing Units) are designed for computationally intensive computing. So they can’t run an OS; only the main processor can. That processor can execute the same instructions as an IBM PowerPC 970 and runs just as fast as any PC CPU (4.0Ghz+). Since the Cell is a massively parallel processor, it is 9x faster than a PC chip for parallel work (i.e., rendering). The PowerPC architecture used in the Cell is also used in IBM Blue Gene, the most powerful supercomputer in the world!

It is important to understand that a PC application that is single threaded will run slower on a 2.4GHz Quad CPU/Dual core than it will on a single Pentium 3.0Ghz because in both cases only one core will be utilized! But I’d bet that Vegas running on Linux with a Cell processor will render 9x faster than any PC CPU that exists today. ;-) (maybe even more because the SPU’s specialized vector processing capabilities.)

> WinXPPro is limited to 4 cores. Anything higher you need Linux/Unix

Which is why we need Vegas ported to Linux! :-D

~jr

Instead of having a big machine with quad dual core processors, wouldn't you be better off with multiple machines with single dual core processors in a network rendering farm? With one machine you still have memory limitations (you can run out of address space during a render). With multiple machines, each has its own memory space.

Or (maybe nobody knows), on the big machines can you run a new rendering process in each processor that owns its own, separate virtual addressing space?

a PC application that is single threaded will run slower on a 2.4GHz Quad CPU/Dual core than it will on a single Pentium 3.0Ghz because in both cases only one core will be utilized!

That is true if the instructions used are equally efficient on both processors (which is not the case between AMD and Intel), and that the AMD 64-bit extensions aren't used (AMD Opterons will run XP64 for example, while only the most recent Intel CPUs are AMD-compatible, er, have the EMT64 instructions borrowed from AMD).

> That is true if the instructions used are equally efficient on both processors (which is not the case between AMD and Intel),

Or even PowerPC! Yes, very true. I should have been more accurate. Ghz is a meaningless measurement across CPU architectures. But you get the intent. ;-)

In the spirit of the original thread about 4 dual cores, I started this thread about Blades that have Cell processors. With each Cell having 9 cores and each blade chassis holding up to 14 blades, you could have 126 cores!!!

Now that is some serious processing power for a rendering farm.

~jr

Yes, the Cell definitely has serious promise.

Hope would be that some manufacturer is able to drive this for practical applications.

It's already easier to walk the corridors at those companies who used to have 300 PCs there cranking around the clock on renders.

Lucasfilm bought 1,000 Opteron workstations from HP, even before the Opterons were announced, and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem buying Cell workstations/servers if that would help them work faster.

If a fan goes bad on one of those mothers, would it just--you know--burst into flames?