[gentoo-amd64] Re: Planning a new box - AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon?

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

"Conway S. Smith" <beolach@comcast.net> posted
20071111053814.06ce20f3@mandalor.homelinux.net, excerpted below, on  Sun,
11 Nov 2007 05:38:14 -0700:

> Well, I've been looking at the new Barcelona Opteron 2300 series, which
> have 4 cores each & can be used in dual socket motherboards, for a total
> of 8 cores in the system.  The 2 or 4 cores in an Athlon X2 system
> really would be sufficient for my needs, but then my current box is
> still pretty much sufficient for my needs.  This new box I'm planning is
> more about my wants, and I look at 8 cores & think "I want!"

For general workstation use, including Gentoo, 4 cores should be about 
enough for now.  Same with 4 gig of memory.  I went with 8 gig memory, 
but if I had it to do over I'd stick with 4 gig and get the dual-cores 
sooner.

The more cores you get, the more things have to parallelize in ordered to 
use them.  It's coming, but really isn't there yet.  There are too many 
makefiles that haven't been designed with massive parallelization in mind.

Of course, there are applications where 8-core is useful.  Just not for 
general Gentoo desktop/workstation use, IMO.  A pair of 30" Apple Cinema 
(like 2900x1600 or some such, resolution) or comparable LCDs and a decent 
GPU (or set of GPUs) to run them seems better use of that sort of money, 
to me, and what I'm looking at for next upgrade after my eyes (lasik).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

-- 
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list