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

[Kris Kennaway]

Josh Carroll wrote:
>> Yes, 4BSD is still the default, although you definitely want to use ULE
>> for performance reasons (NB: only on 7, dont use ULE on 6).  I don't
>> know whether the release engineers plan to change that default, but I
>> will check.
> 
> Great, thanks for the info. Good to know, I'll be sure to use ULE when
> 7.0 is released. :)
> 
>> JFYI, buildworld is a really bad benchmark for testing SMP performance
>> in general (on 4 cpus it is not too bad), because the makefiles are not
>> written to efficiently parallelize builds on many CPUs, so large parts
>> end up running with only a single make job at a time.
> 
> Understood, just a data point. :) Probably a better one: ffmpeg
> encoding H.264 content with -threads 8 is nearly 4x as fast as a
> single threaded ffmpeg process, so it's scaling well at least for
> ffmpeg (linked against pthread).

That's good to know.  You should be using libthr for threaded 
performance though :)  That benchmark is probably almost all userland 
though, so performance may not suffer much from libpthread.

Kris