Work station CPU's

[dspring3]

Work station CPU's

Hi,
I'm looking to purchase a mid range workstation for heavier work using non 64bit XP Professional.

Will Alibre work well with a P4 Dual Core processor?
Will Alibre work well with a DUAL XENON machine (two processor)?
Suggestions welcome.

Thanks in advance for all!

David

 

[swertel]

Alibre is not multithreaded so you will not get any major benefit from going with a multiprocessor machine. Dual cores still need to be tested, but based on their architecture only a minimal improvement could be expected.

But, if AD is performing an processor intense computation, then having another CPU to be able to drive other applications is nice. That is the indirect benefit.

--Scott

 

[siggy]

I don't believe you're correct saying that Alibre is not multithreaded. On my installation starting Alibre spawns out between 42 and 51 new threads when viewing task manager. Stopping Alibre releases the same number of threads.

Having said that, it is entirely possible that individual functionality within Alibre might not take advantage of spawning new threads but clearly there are individual threads running various features of the Alibre engine and interface.

Robert

 

[cclark440]

I have a Dell Precision 470 with dual 3.2Xeons. While Alibre does run a little faster, the real benefit is if you are trying to run other apps while also running Alibre.

 

[usicad.support]

We recently bought a powerfull computer for documentation and video purposes. P4 3.8 HT, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256 Mo

Alibre is able to load the CPU at more than 50% for long times. This means that Alibre is already (partly) multithreaded, and should perform well on multiple-(multiple-core) (dream of Apple G5-quad ? ;p). This is probably an unexpected benefit of client-server architecture of Alibre Design.

Of course, some key parts are (unfortunately) not multithreaded and stay at 50% CPU load.

But finally, I am quite happy with (virtual)multi-cpu P4HT.

regards
stephane

 

[Ralf]

I have worked with DELL precision 370 for a year very well.
- Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3,60 GHz HT
- L1 cache 16 KB
- L2 cache 1.024 KB
- 2 GB RAM
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 - 128 MB Driver 77.77 !!!

Regards
Ralf

German Alibre support team