Technical Question - CPU Selection for UGS

[drnanayakkara]

Hi all,

In the process of building a new computer purely for cad work with UGS. I am a novice in UGS and would like to develop my skills further.

I have two options, build a new i7 950 processor based system or buy an old workstation that is up for sale at work.

The work station is a HP XW8200. It has 8gb of RAM and 2x 3.2Ghz Intel Xeon processors (I believe it has 800mhz FSB and 2mb L2 cache).

My two questions to the experts out there would be:

- I read that UGS can support dual processors (so it will fully utilise the 2x cpu in the HP) is this correct?

- Which one would win in outright performance? (i7 950 with 4gb ram or the HP above)?

No matter which system I go with, it will have the same video card (512mb Quadro).

I appreciate all your help!

 

[looslib]

NX only supports multiple processors in certain and very limited portions of the code. The advantage of muliple processors or cores in sharing the total system load.
I think the i7-950 would out-perform a Xeon machine.

A word of caution on building your own machine: Siemens only offers support on their certified machines. Any issue with graphics or processing a NX command and GTAC can tell you they can't help because they can't duplicate the problem.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[wmalan]

If the price is right... I'd consider the dual Xeons. That's if the price is right. It makes a difference if your using multiple apps.

--
Bill

 

[NXMold]

"NX only supports multiple processors in certain and very limited portions of the code"

In english, its single threaded and only uses one cpu. You'll practically never find that multi-threaded bit thats hidden somewhere for the purpose of marketing as a multi-threaded app.

The i7 machine will spank the old HP, hands down, but if the HP is cheap then it might be worth saving yourself some cash. The i7 is quad-core so you'll still have TONS of extra processor power for other apps.

NX 7.5.0.32 MoldWizard

 

[JohnRBaker]

Not true! Several of the more intensive Solid Modeling tasks leverage multiple (up to 4) cores, including Boolean operations, facet generation, mass property calcualtions and Hidden Line Removal. While it is true that over the course of a day the impact may be statistically small, that still doesn't mean that there is no appreciation for making at least some of the tasks faster.

Besides, if you're looking at the advantages of multi-core over a single CPU configuration, there are other areas of the NX which leverages multiple cores without having to actually have multi-threaded applications.

The two most recent example is first the Movie capture option added in NX 6.0. If you have a multi-core system when you launch a video capture task from withing NX using this new 'Record Movie' function (this is found on a toolbar titled 'Movie' as well as on the 'Sequence Playback' toolbar in Assembly Sequencing) it will execute the frame-grabbing process using a different core than where NX is running. This can be quire noticeable if you're doing any sort of display rotations or other graphics tasks during the video capture session. When running on a single-core system this can be a real drag, but one a multi-core system, you may hardly notice much of a difference at all.

The second more recent opportunity where took advantage of multiple cores is with the option to now spawn toolpath generation in such a way that it frees up NX to allow the user to continue to work in the part file from which he launched the task, thus allowing the user to set up subsequent toolpath generations which, when completeed, can be loaded back into the work part as if you had done a dedicated run, yet you were actually running in parallel. Now again, this will work on a single-core system, just that you will see the performance hit big time. So if either of these tasks are ones you might be doing in the near future, you should seriously consider a multi-core machine.

Note that over time we may find other unique opportunities to leverage multi-core systems which does not require highly sophisticated software architectures which does NOT mean that we are not continuing with R&D projects trying to implement additional multi-threaded applications and tools which over time should provide some progressive improvement in performance, just that the latter is not an easy task and will take time, while the former will be on a case by case basis can will be leveraged when and if the opportunity presents itself.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[ewh]

Thanks for that update, John!

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]