Thursday, August 30, 2007

Effect of the CPU on an application

I am working on a C4I application using GIS engine, and since the engine uses the CPU for it's calculations (not many GIS systems use the capabilities of graphics cards so far) the effect of the processor is critical in terms of performance.
We recently ran a test of the same system and scenario, once with an old processor, and once with a new, faster (both in clock speed and FSB), HyperThreading capable processor.

According to some benchmarks, the new processor performed twice better than the old one, and so did the application in the tests I ran - the processor load with the new processor was 50% of the load with the old one, meaning 100% improvement, the same as the processor showed in the benchmarks.
So if your system's configuration's specification was set up long before the final release, consider upgrading it - replacing a CPU may save you month of development optimizing performance.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you check the CPU utilization of the specific process? HT may be tricky and might show you a twice better performance, while actually running the same process twice will cause the system to hang. That’s even though each process consumes only 30-40%, How come? HTT is Dual-Core.
In short, it just seems to be twice as fast, while it's not.

Anonymous said...

Hi Tal
I checked the CPU for the specific process, both with Task manager and perfmon, and both showed the same results.
In addition to that, the benchmarks for both CPU also support my claims.