[hvem10]

While waiting for the new Xeon 8 core from Intel.
Does anyone have experience with the Xeon X5650,60,70,80 six core.
The price is competitive with the Xeon 4 core, X5550,60,70
I am interested in the parallel performance, It would be nice to know how well they would scale in a workstation with 2 Units, so up to 12 cores.
Thanks in advance

[cmarsh]

I've been doing some research for recent purchase and found the six core 56series processors slower per core than the same speed quad 55 series. My conclusion is that the bus speed/memory becomes the limiting factor.
Price wise you get more cores per machine with the 56 seriers but you have to buy a faster cpu to get the same 'per-core' performance.
So in the end I purchased two servers with two 5550 cpus in each as this was the best value for money.
So unless the bus speed/memory bandwidth is improved I'm not sure that the eight core cpus will be worth the $.

[hvem10]

it is my impression by comparing a few runs that the x56 is better in parallel performance, so with CFD for parallel computing it would selct the x56.
Think more tests are needed

[RobertB]

A benchmark I saw for a CFD code showed the elapsed time the same for a 5570 and 5670, both running all cores. This would imply, at least for this code, that the 5570's cores can max out the memory bus and that more cores are no benefit.

[bramv101]

1. depends on the size of your models, scaling only works up to a certain amount
2. over here 2*Xeon 5670, and i cant complain. I ll see if i have time to compare to the other 5500 workstation. My guess is that for bigger models it is certainly worth it