[SATLUG] Core 2 Quad for how much?!

[Borries Demeler]

> Depends on what you mean by "support it". Blender running on a linux box 
> will gladly use as many cores as you have for rendering. You tell it how 
> many processors you have and it will take advantage of them. If you are 
> talking about the OS splitting the load evenly across the cores 
> regardless of how the apps were written, then no. At least not yet. This 
> is one of the things that is supposed to be included in the next version 
> of OSX, Leopard. It is rumored that the OS will split the entire system 
> load across all cores evenly. Perhaps the linux kernel guys will follow 
> suit in the near future.

Linux will balance the load on the system just fine - it's only a question
of the software you are running whether you can take advantage of multiple
CPU's within one application. If the software is multi-threaded, or you
use some parallel framework (mpi, pvm), you can use all of the procs in
a single application, otherwise, the application will only use 1 CPU (or
a portion of it). Any subsequent application will be shuttled to another
processor automatically by Linux until all of them are used. Application
here is used somewhat freely - it could be a system task as well. So, Linux
supports multiple processor architectures just fine, but if you don't
have enough tasks or multi-threaded software to take advantage of it
it really doesn't buy you much. For me, just being able to run multiple
CPU hungry applications simultaneously is often worth having multi-cpu
systems.

-Borries