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

[Garrett Cooper]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Maxim Khitrov wrote:
>> On 9/14/07, Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 9/14/07, Maxim Khitrov <mkhitrov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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
>>> There seems to be some general issues with 7 and e6850/q6600 (I 
>>> don't know
>>> if these are due to the processor the chip set or what):
>>>
>>>       * Doesn't reconize both SATA and PATA drives at the same time
>>>       * X ( 7.3) has a hard time using brand specific drivers for PCI-E
>>> cards (for example I am using vesa to drive a nVidia and I get the full
>>> advertised resolution but I also have screen "blinks" see FreeBSD-x11
>>> mailing list for details on all this)
>>>       * Some ports are broken in 7 (in my case all native Java 
>>> compilers and
>>> the hp branded printing subsystem)
>>
>> Could that have something to do with your motherboard? I plan on
>> getting Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6, will likely order all the parts this
>> Monday or Tuesday. My choice is still between those two CPUs even if
>> FreeBSD has some issues with them right now. Hopefully it will be
>> fixed before 7-RELEASE is made.
>>
>> I could still use some advice on which CPU would be better assuming
>> everything works as it should. I'm leaning more towards Q6600, since I
>> could overclock it a bit and essentially get 2 extra cores for free.
>> The main question is still whether ULE will take full advantage of the
>> available processing power and offset the negative impact of lower
>> FSB?
>>
>> On Windows tests it's pretty clear that things like video editing and
>> 3D rendering greatly benefit from four cores, but of course it's
>> difficult to locate similar tests run on other operating systems.
>
> In general, if you are running a multi-process or multi-threaded 
> workload, FreeBSD 7 will be able to make good use of 8 CPU cores.
>
> Over the past 2 years we have done extensive benchmarking and 
> optimizations that have resulted in *huge* performance improvements on 
> many common workloads on 8-core systems.  FreeBSD 7 is now regularly 
> outperforming Linux on the workloads we have compared.  In the near 
> future we will be widening our scope to 16 core systems as well as 
> investigating more benchmarks as we find them.
>
> On the other hand, if you come up with a workload that does not 
> perform well on 7, we want to hear about it so we can fix that bug :)
>
> Kris

    Sidenote: I'd avoid purchasing non-Intel (i.e. nVidia chipset) 
motherboards if you're going to run FreeBSD. The ASUS P5B-Deluxe and 
P5K-E boards work well with FreeBSD, from experience.
    As for X11... haven't really gone there yet on my desktop / server 
with Core 2 CPUs, but I'll be doing that soon. In this arena, stay away 
from ATI cards as they are pretty much VGA capable only under FreeBSD. 
Also, avoid x64 for the time being because the proprietary nvidia driver 
isn't x64 capable (due to issues raised with nVidia about how the 
FreeBSD kernel allocates memory and devices).
    Good luck,
-Garrett