Dual Xeons - a processing platform I am playing with

[g__day (Matthew)]

Originally Posted by rustigsmed

not so sure about that ... for PI purposes anyway..


fastest M4 benchmark - https://www.pixinsight.com/benchmark...X051MI27XK407Z (Total 26356)

fastest E5-2699 v3 (linux) - https://www.pixinsight.com/benchmark...N64CY8O8L08466 (Total 25992)

If you look into that benchmark - the dual Xeons are faster than the M4 - its the NVME drives that owner has paired them with that is retarding his score.

But regardless it is rather impressive that a M4 can keep up with a ten year old dual Xeon - likely because PI is not compiled to leverage the Xeon CPUs specific matrix manipulation capabilities

A further update from STAstro - he has found two interesting insights:

1. WBPP is faster under Windows then Ubuntu - total surprise there
2. Under Windows v1.8.9-1 is materially slower in WBPP than v1.8.9-3 - most of this accrues to Local Normailsation being about 40% faster in the latest version of PI running WBPP v2.7.8

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

Originally Posted by rustigsmed

not so sure about that ... for PI purposes anyway..



fastest M4 benchmark - https://www.pixinsight.com/benchmark...X051MI27XK407Z (Total 26356)


fastest E5-2699 v3 (linux) - https://www.pixinsight.com/benchmark...N64CY8O8L08466 (Total 25992)

That linux benchmark is my PC, a used Dell Precision T7910 workstation that I bought off eBay for $1200 in Jan 2024. What does a Macbook Pro M4 Max (the machine used in the other comparison test liked above) set you back...?

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

Originally Posted by g__day

If you look into that benchmark - the dual Xeons are faster than the M4 - its the NVME drives that owner has paired them with that is retarding his score.

curious about your comment re NVME swap drives compromising performance. The swap storage directories (16 in all) are on a fast NVME SSD that is separate to both the OS drive and the PI working directory.

Other than using a ramdisk for PI swap, how else would you suggest setting up the swap directories to improve performance?

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

Originally Posted by rmuhlack

That linux benchmark is my PC, a used Dell Precision T7910 workstation that I bought off eBay for $1200 in Jan 2024. What does a Macbook Pro M4 Max (the machine used in the other comparison test liked above) set you back...?

nice job with the setup / benchmark.

i think you're looking at about $5k for that particular model.

[g__day (Matthew)]

I am not sure how he has set up his NVME drives - but if it used an add on Gen 4 PCIE card and set it up in RAID 0 that score would double and - if he is on Gen 5 then its performance would be double again! RAMDisks sometimes don't score as high as the very best NVME drives in RAID 0 - not sure why that is the case though...

BTW PixInsight v1.9 dropped yesterday - for a brief moment in time - I had the two fastest Windows based systems scores in the world that's right - my setup were the only two Windows enteries. V1.9 for Windows scores about 2,000 points lower than V1.8.9-3 - I haven't tried WBPP on it yet though!