AMD vs P4
 

Hello, i´m thinking in buying a portable computer to do my cfd at home too, but i dont know which would have more accurate for the fluent amd 64 or p4, Can any one tell my what is the best proccesor for fluent? And i will also like to know which parameters are importants for cfd, like bandwith of the memory, Ram.. etc.

Re: AMD vs P4
 

Javier,

1. You shouldn't see a difference in accuracy. 2. Total amount of memory could be very important, especially if you want to run the coupled solver. 2 GB is probably minimum. 3. Memory bandwidth is very important. 4. Front side bus frequency is very important. 5. Cache size is very important. 6. Processor floating point execution speed is very important.

Point 6 especially used to favour the AMD Athlon XP over the P4, while 3 and 4 heavily favoured P4 over Athlon. The AMD64 architecture now also favours Athlon64 / FX / Opteron over P4 in terms of 3 and 4. At the moment AMD64 is almost certainly better. It gets even better if you can use 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Fluent (when it becomes available), because you should be able to access more memory. However, if you are talking about a laptop computer, be careful, many of these have a slower memory system (and less memory capacity) and use clock throttling to keep the temperature and power consumption under control. You may think that you have a 2 GHz CPU, but once it starts to work, it may have to throttle back to 800 Mhz (or whatever).