is there any real world difference between a dual opteron and a dual xeon workstation... will the data flow with less of a bottleneck or is more a funtion of your broker...
The real question is, do you really need it for your trading system? Just get a dual core and put 2 gigs of rams on it. you will be more than enough to run it.
Hi Chi' No, this is a very good question... !! I have an AMD 64 3500 and i am not sure it works as efficeiently as a P4 3.6 which is its counterpart in Intel... on esignal or other charting software. The CPU tops out on my AMD system when i hear that it does not on an equal (mostly) P4 system... so color me confused because AMD is supposed to be the better chip from what i have read... and i am thinking of going Dual Core and now can't decide AMD or Intel... so feeback from others would be great... cj.. __________________ HAVE STOP - WILL TRADE If You Have The Vision We Have The Code
fwiw: I have a dual core P4, and is having a difficult time keeping both cores busy. I primarily use it for simulation, and will have to redo the simulation software to get any benefit. At present the dual core runs slower than a single core HT at the same clock rate running the same simulation. So much for an improvement
I looked at both and decided AMD Operton single core times two cpu's. Nitro and Zzzzzzzzzz discussed this in chat and both had good reasons to go either way. Zzz said Xeon for speed relative to AMD, Nitro said AMD for less heat generated. I decided on less heat with 2 single core Opertons mainly because for trading etc that should be overkill as it is. ZZZ also said the bottleneck is in the bus anyway and not in the cpu itself. Cost wise there is no sense in getting two dual core chips for my use. I might go overkill some but that just is my way of not needing to upgrade so often. Later if i do decide to go with 2 dual-core chips, the motherboard will indeed support such animals. Quad applications are not yet needed for trading, charts, web conferencing etc yet. Anyway, my vote is for dual chips of single core each. this box will not be completed until the full version of VISTA comes out, I might get it up and running with an old copy of windows 2000 pro to make sure all is well. That way i will not need to call Bill Gates and get permission to run his horseturd windows XP pro everytime i make a change. That still aggravates me. If i bought a new car it is perfectly fine to let someone else use it, but not with software. there should be a difference between useing what one paid for and being considered a thief of it is used in another machine for ones own use. ....:eek:
thanks all... i am running 2 dual processor ibm 6221 workstations each with 3 gig of ram... i am experiencing quote bottle necks and getting dinged because of it... my processor load is at about 50% so i am confused... maybe my isp or quote vendor... who knows as the issue is intermittent... thanks again for the info... i know just enough to be dangerous...
I would agree with calip - dual core with 2 Gig Ram should be enough, with one caveat: namely your video card. If it's underpowered and on Open gl it can quickly drain your processing power. Heavy graphics, especially on multiple screens will bring the most powerful system to its knees if the right card is not being used. Gamers will happily spend 500 bucks for a good card, Just a shot in the dark!
Ok, what would be underpowerd - i have a 3 monitor setup with an Appian Graphics card... should i check the video ram... what would be the best range... cj...
For 99.9% percent of people on this board, there is absolutely no real world difference. Either processor is more than overkill for most applications, as most come nowhere close to reaching boundary conditions on these processors. I will grant you the %0.1 exception, say for a production application processing more than 5,000 messages per second. I would expect that most retail level applications would not take advantage of multiple processors at all, so having two processors would simply create greater reliability risk. -segv
Please do remember that even if you are running just a single program it doesn't mean that is all your computer is running. There is the whole load of the actual operating system and its services and device drivers. You might not realize these are executable code and thus load on your cpu whereas any "program" that you are running. Having two cores or cpus helps in the sense that one core can be dedicated to the trading application while other stuff can run on the other. That said, many trading platforms are not very cpu intensive. For every 10 minutes of cpu time used on my single core 2 GHz P4 for the trading platform, there is 60 minutes of idle time spent in the system idle process. And this computer is 4 years old! Only 1/6 capacity utilization, very low. Of my 768 MB ram, only 330 MB are used by trading software and operating system combined. Rest is unused, just like 5/6 of my cpu power. If you are running WinXP open the Task Manager (ctrl-shift-esc) at the end of the day while your trading application is still open and see the CPU time column in the Processes tab. If CPU time is not visible select View->Select Columns and check it. That will tell you how much cpu resources you are using in reality. Compare it to the idle process time. Only if there is very little idle time you might actually have a cpu starved system. The real bottleneck most often is not the computer but the internet connection. Also brokers differ.