Originally Posted by ger21  OK, if you want to assign a specific processor, than youdo need to set the affinity. But, from my experience, I doubt that it would make much difference. |
Completely agree. The only difference setting affinity will make is lowering the chance that an on-board CPU cache will need to be rebuilt because of the process migrating to another CPU. If you are accessing large quantities of memory (likely in CAD/CAM) there are already lots of cache misses. The only time that I have seen affinity make a difference is with real CPU insensitive apps that mainly fit within the caches of the CPU in the presence of competing applications. Multi-core is not a lot different from this perspective other than some processors have shared caches for the cores while others have independent caches. In the situation of shared caches, the performance of the CPU does not scale as well with the number of cores because of cache contention.
Bottom line: you're getting a great machine. You may be ahead of the software you are running but with technologies such as OpenMP multi-core/processor programming has become a lot easier and we should expect lot more applications utilizing parallel design. Just consider redunancy a little... UPS, RAID, backup, etc. Also, if you need additional machines and cost does become a factor consider the 490 line as well.