Building a new workstation - dual or quad-core CPU for FreeBSD 7?

Maxim Khitrov mkhitrov at gmail.com
Fri Sep 14 13:51:40 PDT 2007


Hello,

I'm about to purchase a new system for myself. It will dual-boot
Windows XP, which will be primarily used for gaming, and FreeBSD 7.0
for everything else. I wanted to ask if the new ULE scheduler will
benefit from having four cores on the CPU, meaning that if I have many
concurrent tasks, is it able to efficiently spread the load over all
available cores?

My choices for CPU are either the dual-core E6850 or quad-core Q6600.
The latter has lower FSB (1066 vs 1333) and frequency (2.4 vs 3.0),
but I'm trying to decide if the addition of two extra cores will bring
about noticeable improvements. There are also some issues for gaming,
but let's ignore those for a moment. Which CPU would benefit FreeBSD
7.0 the most, which one would you pick?

- Max


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