gboulton wrote:
1) Would a hyperthreaded quad core i7 significantly increase StarTools' performance over a quad core i5, all other things being equal?
For image processing, the number of cores is paramount, with other things like CPU cache also being important. If the number of cores are equal, I don't see an i7 have a huge advantage over an i5. To get a better idea on CPU performance differences, you could consult some multi-core benchmark results. Memory access/performance is fairly important as StarTools shifts around huge quantities of data!
gboulton wrote:
2) Does StarTools make significant use of the GPU, as a hard core gaming system might, or are more of its demands on the CPU itself?
StarTools currently does not make use of the GPU at all for a number of reasons;
The more complex the algorithms become, the harder it becomes to efficiently implement these on GPUs. For example, the deconvolution algorithm in StarTools is a very complex beast that requires per-pixel Gaussian kernel generation and grabs input from 3 or 4 subtly different copies of the input image. GPUs hate that sort of stuff - they are very good at performing simple operations a lot of times, but not good at performing complex that require lots of input data.
Moving data back and forth between the CPU and GPU quickly becomes a bottleneck, while GPU performance really drops as well when handling 64-bit doubles 32-bit integers.
Then there is the matter of pervasiveness of the technology. OpenCL enabled computers are unfortunately too few and far between (my development rig unfortunately falls into that category too).[/quote]
gboulton wrote:
3) What single component of a system would you try hardest to maximize, if you could only choose one?
Assuming you have a decent amount of memory (upwards of 6Gb), then I would say the number of cores. These days, an enthusiast would probably not consider an AMD rig, however in StarTools' particular case they offer a real bang-for-your buck; AMD's newer offerings share an FPU per (otherwise full-fledged integer) core to keep the cost down. Since StarTools typically performs its calculations in integer math, this really mitigates that one AMD drawback. This means you could have the performance of an 8-core CPU for the price of an i3 which could be quite attractive.
Hope this helps!
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