8-core Mac!

[Martin Naef]

Hi Peter

Peter Korsten wrote:
>> p.s. the render shows it using 45 threads and 1.50 GB of real memory
>> this machine is a 2x 3 Ghz dual core Xeon w/ a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500  

> Hmm, running more than four threads on a four core machine is a bit 
> useless... all the context switches will just slow it down.

Not necessarily. It just means you leave the load balancing to the OS 
instead of trying to keep the processors busy manually.

> Which brings me to the question: how many floating point units does the 
> Xeon have per CPU?

I couldn't quickly find the info, but it must be at least two 64bit FPU 
units (may be dual-mode for 32bit SSE which runs at up to four 32bit 
float operations per cycle) to keep SSE2 busy every cycle (and they can) 
per core.

Bye
Martin

-- 
http://www.navisto.ch
http://www.myspace.com/navisto