Will IE3D v.10 benefit from dual core processors?
I'm considering updating my PC for faster simulation speed. I use IE3D v.10 for most of my work. But I'm not sure whether to select single-core CPUs with higher frequency, or to choose dual-core CPUs at about the same price but with slightly lower frequency compared to the single-core ones. Which will be faster running IE3D? Can anyone familiar with IE3D help me about this problem?
Thank you!
Hi, ieeexxxxxx:
I would strongly suggest you to go for dual core or dual cpus. A single simulation of IE3D, at this time, will not benefit from dual cores or dual CPUs unless you use the ZDS/ZDM (Zeland Distributed-simulation Service and Zeland Distributed Manager). However, you can run 2 ie3d simulations simultanouesly without slowing down the speed. Even you are running one single simulation, you can still benefit from it. You can still work on pre-and post-processing or other windows applications without feeling the computer is slow. For single CPU computers, you will feel very slow when you are running a simulation. Also, eventually, we will make dual CPUs accessible to IE3D. I don't believe it will be a long time for it because VC++ 8.0 or most C++ compilers allow us to compile the code for multiple CPUs without sacrificing the portability of the source code. Portability of the source code is one of the main reasons we have not make dual CPU support available to IE3D. When VC++ 8.0 or any newer compiler resolves this problem, we have removed one of the major reasons not to go for dual CPUs. Another major reason for it is that we are still working intensively to speed up the simulation by improving the algorithm. Improving the algorithm is still the best way to improve the speed. We will consider the dual CPUs soon after we finish some major improvements on the IE3D algorithm in the near term. Regards.
Hi, jian:
Thank you for your opinion. That really helped me think in a different way.
Best regards,
ieeexxxxxx