This was a rather frustrating read. This concern with deadline is of a very narrow viewpoint. A point I wanted to make, but was never addressed, can't be added to the conversation because it's locked.
The concern with deadlines is limited in scope to the time elapsed since the time assigned, which is not good. What I am saying here is that there's probably a queue of WUs that need to be completed. Suppose you run WUs 1 through 10 on your quad. You run them consecutively which means they complete one after another. But suppose you run them concurrently, ie in parallel?
1. It's true WU 1 will finish later with 2 cores than with 4 cores.
2. Right off the bat WU 2 starts immediately. That's a huge head start.
When running 2 SMPs each WU will not take twice as long, but more like 40% longer, so:
3. WU 2 will finish sooner than if run consecutively.
4. WU 3 will start a little sooner.
5. WU 4 will start much sooner.
Now stretch this compound savings of time to 100+ and you see WU's completing before they would otherwise have even started, and the longer you do this for the greater the savings. How big of an improvement? 1000 PPD means I finish an additional WU within the same amount of time compared to running one SMP on a quad every 2 days. That means it started and completed before it would have otherwise even started.
The argument of running only 1 SMP per quad to me has almost no credibility.
And on top of that, even my E6400, admittedly running at 3.2 GHz, finishes a WU in less than 24 hours, as would 2 cores in a quad running at the same speed. Actually the quad would be faster because it has a much larger cache than my processor (6MB versus 2MB) .
To penalize people for not completing within the 24 hour preferred window would be to penalize anybody who purchased a slow dual processor. Better to determine which processors (regardless of count) can complete a preferred WU in the preferred time and allot those WUs accordingly.
One other confusing item - If communications that occur over the NB are problematic, it would seem there would be a significantly better pair of processors than can be combined, ie only 1 pairing would be far more optimal, and yet, that's not seen to a large extent.