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

[Josh Carroll]

> 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).

Josh