Exercising Multi-core

Next week, I’ll be revealing some cool new hardware I am reviewing. Right now, I’m in the middle of running some tests and I am impressed with the amount of computing power I have in my basement. One component of the hardware I’m reviewing is a dual Intel Xeon Gulftown server (6 cores each, 12 cores total). Thus, I have a chance to see how well the latest Intel multi-core memory bandwidth is holding up.

I have always been puzzled as to why people focus on a single thread or core when evaluating performance on a multi-core processor. I mean the “multi” part means more than one core and to me that means running more than one program on a single machine. Seems simple enough, but I have rarely seen these types of numbers for multi-core systems.

I created a short test script that is described in a previous

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