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

[Josh Carroll]

> 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.

Isn't the default scheduler still 4BSD on -CURRENT? Is ULE considered
stable on SMP systems now, and does it really outperform 4BSD? If so,
will it be set as the default scheduler once 7.0 is released?

To the original question, go with the Q6600, especially if you can get
a G0 stepping. It'll easily do 3.2 GHz (lowered 8x multiplier with 400
MHz FSB) if you get DDR2-800 capable RAM. Even the B3 stepping will do
3.2 I think, but will run hotter.

I would avoid P35 chipsets for now, as there is limited support for
the south bridge (ICH9). I think there are some patches (which may be
merged into -CURRENT, not sure). I'm not sure whether the Marvell
chipset(s) used on the P35 boards are supported or not, and USB may or
may not work.

The P965 chipset boards will support the Q6600 and many of them will
support Penryn when it comes out (the 45nm based true quad core Intel
CPU). I have an Asus P5B and a Q6600 running at 3.4 GHz on 6.2-RELEASE
and it screams (8:20 to build world with make -j8, for example). So
even 6.2 will take good advantage of the 4 cores, and I imagine it'll
only get better when 7.0 is released. I'd just avoid the bleeding edge
motherboards/chipsets.

Josh