[clug] Dual core or dual processor?

[Hugh Fisher]

I'm looking into options for a new PC that will be
mostly running a realtime 3D graphics/virtual reality
development system.

The plan is to have two main threads. One will be the
3D scene graph renderer, which even with modern 3D
graphics cards means a lot of floating point crunching
for high level culling, head tracking, morphing, and
whatever. The other is a Python thread which creates
and controls the 3D scene, running high level logic
and 'game AI' type code such as flocking.

Each thread has a few megabytes of code and can have
tens of megabytes of data. They are threads rather
than processes because the scene graph and the Python
objects have lots of references into each other, so
share address space. Every time a frame is rendered the
scene graph code gets rendering parameters from Python
code, and Python code changes the scene graph.

My question is, will a dual processor system perform
significantly better than one dual core CPU on this
kind of workload? My first guess would be yes, but I
really have no idea how a 'hyperthreaded' system
actually schedules threads and/or manages cache and
memory.

Any advice, or pointers to advice, appreciated.

	cheers,
	Hugh