Comment It's a question of money and psychology (Score 1) 368
I've been using a dual Pentium-133 system for a
few years now. At the time I built it, a P-200 was
the only way up and way too expensive, buying a
second P5-133 and a dual-cpu board was significantly cheaper, giving about the same performance (I roughly get a maximum 1.8 times speed increase.). The machine is mainly used for
compilations and for that it really speeds up things.
There's some psychology involved:
If you start a huge job on a single cpu machine, you can feel it slow down, while on a SMP machine you won't notice it, because you only use one cpu at a time interactively, the second cpu being busy or not is hardly noticeable. So, SMP feels faster, because it doesn't slow down - even when a single cpu system would give you more performance, but its performance varies more.
few years now. At the time I built it, a P-200 was
the only way up and way too expensive, buying a
second P5-133 and a dual-cpu board was significantly cheaper, giving about the same performance (I roughly get a maximum 1.8 times speed increase.). The machine is mainly used for
compilations and for that it really speeds up things.
There's some psychology involved:
If you start a huge job on a single cpu machine, you can feel it slow down, while on a SMP machine you won't notice it, because you only use one cpu at a time interactively, the second cpu being busy or not is hardly noticeable. So, SMP feels faster, because it doesn't slow down - even when a single cpu system would give you more performance, but its performance varies more.
