Re: Hardware donation
I've been following the whole AMD/Intel thing for quite a while, and I've been
lurking here for a few days. I'm not a kernel programmer, I don't know the
intricacies of debian packaging (or even of gcc), but I am a technical guy,
I've been running debian on my Thinkpad for over a year now and I think that
I know something (even though I have primarily a Windows background). I don't
know if you guys will find the following tidbits useful, but I'll open my
mouth anyway...
Firstly, the following article would indicate that gcc might very much prefer
two processor machines, for some reason:
4P Opteron Kernel Compile Times
http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?ArticleID=1289
Secondly, there are motherboards aimed at workstations (single processors and
AGP, with a variation on the NForce chipset) due soon (July, IIRC).
Thirdly, it seems to me that most AMD64 installations will likely be 2P or 4P
servers until the Athon64 comes out in the early fall (September, IIRC), and
for several months beyond that. I believe that you will find that most of the
current motherboards don't have AGP (including that K8D), which is a given on
a modern consumer-level machine.
(Does that K8D have on-board IDE? I don't see it in the specs. If it does, I
don't know if it does hardware RAID, if it's supported by linux or how much
faster it is versus software RAID. Software RAID worries me because it is a
no-no in the Windows universe.)
Lastly, according to PriceWatch, it seems that the sweet spot for pricing in
drives is at the 120 GB (1.31 GB/$) and the 160 GB (1.38 GB/$) level. If you
want to use RAID, I'd vote for a few 120 GB drives (depending on whether you
want RAID 1 or RAID 5.)
Thoughts?
-d
On Thursday 12 June 2003 04:17 am, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 02:56:56PM -0400, Bart Trojanowski wrote:
> > * Thom May <thom@positive-internet.com> [030611 14:39]:
> >> Also, what sort of level of hardware would be best? I imagine that
> >> a low end box with a decent amount of ram and disk space would
> >> probably be fine?
> >
> > At this time a lowest of the low end AMD64 box will run you about
> > $2k USD. It will include 2 Opteron 240 CPUs, an MSI K8D master
> > mobo, ~ 1G of RAM, and a modest hard-disk.
>
> I looked a bit at online resellers, the absolutely bottom price is
> more like 1100 USD. This includes only 256MB RAM, and one CPU. HD is
> ATA (which is fine, I guess). Only one year guarantee on the parts,
> too. I didn't really look at the details, maybe absolutely necessary
> things like NIC are missing, too.
>
> http://www.micropro.com/syslist.htm?product=Servers&sub=AMD%20Opteron%20Ser
>vers
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