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Imagine this base configuration: 1-cpu board with a 4-core processor, performance is 100%.

How different from that configuration performance-wise will be:

  • 2-cpu board with 4-core processors
  • 1-cpu board with 8-core processor

The total number of cores in both configs is 8 and that's twice as many as in the base config, so my guess is their performance is supposed to be 200% of base config, but then I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to make a decent guess.

Price is not my concern in this question, I just want to know how the performance changes if the total cpu core number increase is done within and outside a single processor.

My personal interest lies in gaming and game development. I don't know about other games, but my own games I try to make multithreaded, so they could take advantage of all those cpu cores on my pc.

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  • It's dependent upon what it is your going to be doing, for example if your compiling code you want to be worrying about threads not cores. Performance is relative to application. Provide more detail and you get a more precious answer.
    – 50-3
    Sep 11, 2013 at 9:03

1 Answer 1

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Having two CPUs on a single board requires synchronization between both which is not necessary on a single CPU. It would be a given to assume that a single CPU with the same amount of cores as two physical CPUs has an advantage here thanks to less overhead - assuming that the application you plan to run even scales well enough not to be a bottleneck in itself.

At the same time, one could assume that a CPU with less cores probably produces less heat and thus two physical CPUs could be overclocked higher than a single one, resulting in a higher performance. Since maximum performance seems to be your main concern, this should also be something to think about. Of course, this is a gross generalization since you didn't even specify the CPU brand you plan to acquire, let alone the model and there's a plethora of CPUs available and all have to be treated differently.

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  • I'm not looking for a shopping recommendation, just for the current situation with performance. Sep 11, 2013 at 9:23
  • A two CPU system would also double system memory bandwidth. If the software is not optimized for NUMA, more frequent accesses to remote memory may not only increase access latency but also make the interconnect between CPUs a bandwidth bottleneck. In addition, having two chips may increase the amount of cache per core with an obvious potential impact on performance.
    – user180742
    Sep 11, 2013 at 11:35
  • Another thing to think about for dual AMD-based boards would be that modern AMD CPUs have an on-die memory controller. This would mean that there would be two memory controllers on board. I can't tell whether this would be negative for performance or a benefit. In any way it shows that the question is too general and should at least be brand specific. Sep 11, 2013 at 11:41

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