Re: [gentoo-user] [OT]Real compute cycles in a laptop?

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 05:18, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
>    I'm in the market for a new laptop. I sold mine about a year ago
> and it's time to get a new one. I will run both Linux and Win XP on
> the machine. The Linux workload will not be anything substantial but
> when in Win XP I have a program that I'll be running that is very
> compute bound on my only XP desktop machine.
>
>    Does anyone know of good comparative data on BogoMIPs in Linux vs.
> real compute speed for different processors? I'm looking for some way
> to compare different processors in the laptops I'm looking at vs. my
> current XP desktop which is my slowest machine.
>
>    The application under Windows is doing neural network stuff. I
> have no idea how much of it is floating point based but my assumption
> is that is a pretty big part of the whole picture. Is the AMD FPU
> still superior to the Intel FPU or are they at parity these days?
>
>    The current machine has 768MB. The application never uses more
> than 256MB and there is no significant disk I/O but the processor
> sits at 100% in XP for hours doing it's work optimizing the neural
> network.

You seem to know enough about these matters already to make a sane 
judgement, so you probably already know that the real answer to your 
question is "it depends".

Here's what I would do: pop along to your local store, preferably not 
one of the big chains, find the sanest sales guy with a clue and 
explain your problem. Don't listen to his recommendations, just ask if 
you can test his demo machines with the actual app in question. If it's 
an owner run store he probably say yes. Then test the thing for real 
and measure progress after 30 minutes or so. Buy the best performer.

This will take a while, but at least you'll know for real which one 
suits your needs best

alan
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