- Joined
- Mar 7, 2008
There's a challenge currently running on PrimeGrid with their ESP subproject which I'm taking part in. Part of the discussion went on to first to return units, as opposed to doing the most for the challenge. That got me thinking...
Past experience showed you have a balance between CPU demand and ram supply for this type of task. At least when running multiple units at once for max throughput, but if you optimise instead for speed... you can run just one and have effectively unlimited ram. But it doesn't stop there. The units are 960k FFT size, which means it only needs 7.5MB of working data. It would fit inside the L3 cache of an i7 and ram speed becomes irrelevant.
So to return the fastest time, you would simply have to get the CPU core and L3 cache speed up as fast as possible. As you're only running one unit, there's no need to have all the cores. The thought is, is there any overclocking benefit to disabling them? Maybe to two, leaning another spare for background tasks. Would this effectively halve the power consumption? Is there a benefit over having all 4 cores available but leaving the others unused?
Past experience showed you have a balance between CPU demand and ram supply for this type of task. At least when running multiple units at once for max throughput, but if you optimise instead for speed... you can run just one and have effectively unlimited ram. But it doesn't stop there. The units are 960k FFT size, which means it only needs 7.5MB of working data. It would fit inside the L3 cache of an i7 and ram speed becomes irrelevant.
So to return the fastest time, you would simply have to get the CPU core and L3 cache speed up as fast as possible. As you're only running one unit, there's no need to have all the cores. The thought is, is there any overclocking benefit to disabling them? Maybe to two, leaning another spare for background tasks. Would this effectively halve the power consumption? Is there a benefit over having all 4 cores available but leaving the others unused?