Modern hardware
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jezuch Feb 02, 2008 4:10 AM EDT |
Quoting:For me, a 1.2 GHz Celeron laptop with 1 GB of RAM is good enough to run just about any Linux distribution out there. I'd like to note that modern hardware has frequency scaling and doesn't run at the top speed all the time; for example my new Athlon 64 X2 (2.8GHz) scales down to 1GHz for 95% of the time. It feels like in the good old days :) And the power reserve is there if I need to compile something in C++ (or play with paq8o8 ;)) |
| dinotrac Feb 02, 2008 5:09 AM EDT |
Methinks people get a wee-bit spoilt... My new laptop (now properly equipped with XP Pro instead of the Vista Home Basic it came with) is a bottom of the line machine with a 1.73 ghz Celeron. 1.73 Ghz Youch!!! It replaces an old Dell top-of-the-line laptop that had a 650mhz PIII. And that's not even getting into the much better graphics, SATA disk, and much faster/bigger memory. Methinks a number of non-geeks non-gamers are being taken to the cleaners these days spending money for higher-end machines. |
| jdixon Feb 02, 2008 9:16 AM EDT |
> Methinks a number of non-geeks non-gamers are being taken to the cleaners these days spending money for higher-end machines. Agreed. Walmart is currently selling an E-Machines unit for $298 in our local stores (it doesn't seem to be available online). From memory, it comes with a Sempron processor (something like 1.6 GHz), 512 MB of memory, a 160 GB hard drive, and a DVD burner. Oh, and Windows XP. :) This machine is more than powerful enough to meet most peoples needs. And you know Vista has flopped when even Walmart is still selling XP machines. |
| hkwint Feb 02, 2008 1:02 PM EDT |
Quoting:For me, a 1.2 GHz Celeron laptop with 1 GB of RAM is good enough to run just about any Linux distribution out there. That depends on if you want to run those 1000 distro's out there parallel in real time or just one after another. Kidding aside, I have to do a little bit of work in Windows XP in a program called Autodesk (known from AutoCAD) Inventor. Because VMWare can't seem to use 3D acceleration, it's painstakingly slow. Therefore, I'd like to use Xen or something. My current AMD chip doesn't include Pacifica, which would be nice if I wanted to do some virtualization. Also, Inventor likes huges amounts of RAM, so I guess I will end up using 4GB RAM, because Linux has to run at the same time as well. In my work as LXer 'writer', I'd also like to try some new distro's. I'm looking for a while how much this will cost me. I calculated a nice environmental-friendly CPU as the AMD BE2400, together with a middle-class video card, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an environmental friendly MoBo is not going to cost me much more than €200 or so. That's not much, considering this will be almost a 'high end' machine which will save money in the longer run because of the lower power-usage and hopefully the same downscaling of the CPU when Gentoo isn't compiling. |
| jezuch Feb 02, 2008 3:27 PM EDT |
Quoting:Methinks people get a wee-bit spoilt... Exactly. IMVHO typical desktop computers have been hopelessly overpowered for "typical workloads" for some time now. How much CPU cycles does word processing need, for $DEITY's sake?? Exactly the same things were done comfortably 20 years ago (and earlier) on the hardware available at that time. I was kinda reluctant to switch to a new machine, because I feared I would get out of touch with reality :) |
| hkwint Feb 03, 2008 2:20 AM EDT |
Quoting:IMVHO typical desktop computers have been hopelessly overpowered Literally true, looking at those 800W power supplies. If networks weren't that slow, there would probably be a whole market of selling / buying CPU cycles. |
| gus3 Feb 03, 2008 7:49 AM EDT |
I donate my spare cycles to Folding@Home. |
| Bob_Robertson Feb 03, 2008 8:14 AM EDT |
My Vaio laptop has no "spare cycles". It automagically scales the CPU for the work being done, for power savings. When I run a Distributed.net code cracker or other such, the fans wind up and the thing gets hot. No thank you. One reason I like using an "modern" laptop is this (expensive) frugality. The only time this thing runs full tilt is when doing video transcoding, playing large h264 videos, or the few graphics-accelerated games that I find to enjoy. The parts for a fast AT style box are cheaper, and I agree the idle cycles are better used than discarded. Now, let's talk about a way to use the GPU as a second processor in a NUMA configuration! Then when I get a really boffo full-case machine with two or four quad-core CPUs and seriously accelerated GPU graphics, I'll find a way to cool it enough to run it full-bore 100% of the time. Maybe win one of the distributed.net contests.... Gee, Nethack is going to _SCREAM_ on a machine like that. I can hardly wait. |
| hkwint Feb 03, 2008 10:00 AM EDT |
Quoting:Maybe win one of the distributed.net contests.... They're still looking for the first 10M-numbers long prime number, the record is a prime number of 9,5M numbers long or so. You will earn $100.000 if you find it on your own, and between $3.000 to $8.000 or so if you find it using GIMPS (no, nothing to do with GIMP), see mersenne.org. The great thing about GIMPS distributed computing is it also uses 'old hardware' in an efficient way. Nonetheless I wonder from an environmental point of view if it's good to use old hardware. Old hardware uses more energy for the same task I guess. Throwing it away is bad for the environment also, and when buying a new one, you have to consider the amount of energy used to manufacture that new low-TDP CPU or MoBo. Living these days is not easy... |
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