I plan to buy new systems as hp xw8400 dual Intel Xeon dual core and hp xw9400 dual AMD Opteron dual core, both comes with Windows XP 32bit also if I plan to partition the hd for a Fedora Linux installation.

I think that 2 dual core processors offer 4 threads, can Mantra take advantage of 2 dual core processors due the fact that probably Windows XP will not support 4 threads.

The threads support of MS Windows xp 64bit are different from xp 32bit?

Thanks

Massimiliano

OS support for threading has nothing to do with an ability of Mantra, PRMan, mental ray or any other application to use multi-threading… or at least WinXP (both x32 and x64) has no serious limitation in this respect. Mantra uses as many cores as you give it. 1, 2, 4, 8. You can also render in multiprocess mode which differs a bit and it's little less efficient but still one can utilize this way multi-core architecture even in h8.

You have nearly linear progression of effectiveness with multi-core architecture. The only problem is a RAM since as you know 32bit WinXP can't use more than 2GB of RAM. Only 64bit system would be a solution. Not sure about H9, but 32bit version of H8.2 installed on 64bit WinXP can take advantage of 4GB virtual memory address in this OS what really makes difference in bigger scenes and compositions (damn Halo )

There are some minor differences in how Linux and Windows handle threads, process but I don't know too much about it. I've just run Houdini 8.2 and 9B on 8core machine. Tested.

cheers,
sy.


PS If I'm not wrong there was some thread here in which one of SESI developer explained some technical issue concerning LIN/WIN differences with process and threads control. Maybe you can search for it. It was like one or two years ago.