Re: [gentoo-user] core i5

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 5:52 AM, Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@xunil.at> wrote:
> Am 24.06.2010 02:25, schrieb Mark Knecht:
>> On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger
>>> How do you use up 24 gigs of DRAM? Just tell me, I would like to
>>> justify that for me as well ;-)
>>
>> 5 copies of Win7 running in vmware VMs. Each VM gets 20GB of RAID0,
>> 2 processors and 4GB of RAM. That's 100GB, 20GB DRAM and 10 threads
>> total. I then have 2 i7-980X threads & 4GB DRAM for running Gentoo
>> as the host. Gentoo runs on RAID1 and I have an additional RAID1
>> which I use to back up the RAID0 daily.
>
> I see. That's way more than I need here, so I will get through with 8 GB
> DRAM easily ...
>
>> Yeah, dual boot is what I'm doing with the i5-661. The i7-980X only
>> runs Gentoo and if I need Windows it's in the 5 VMs described above.
>>
>> The 980X is expensive to run. It's got 5 hard drives in it (2 for
>> RAID0, 3 for RAID1) plus the processor and all that memory burns
>> over 300W at idle.
>
> Also too expensive and big for me. I think I will go for the i5 if I
> decide to upgrade.
>
> Thanks, S
>
>

Really was too expensive for me also, at least for the actual use I'm
making of it so far, but when I need to run a bunch of copies of
Windows in parallel it's pretty nice.

None the less it is fast. I did the kde-4.4.4 upgrade this morning. 94
minutes on the clock. Something like 287 ebuilds. Doesn't include
download time. I did emerge -fDuN earlier:


c2stable ~ # time emerge -DuN kde-meta
<SNIP>

 * Regenerating GNU info directory index...
 * Processed 150 info files.

 * IMPORTANT: 2 config files in '/etc' need updating.

 * IMPORTANT: 17 config files in '/usr/share/config' need updating.
 * See the CONFIGURATION FILES section of the emerge
 * man page to learn how to update config files.

real    94m25.632s
user    246m19.420s
sys     36m19.092s
c2stable ~ #

Even though i have 12 processor threads you can see the effectivity is
more like 3 or 4 1 overall. A lot of the kde compile only uses 1 or 2
cores per package and then there's a lot of time spent waiting for
hard drives, etc.

I did have one vmware instance running at the same time.

Cheers,
Mark