Re: G5 Xserver or Sun Blade 1500
Incoming from Angel:
> I am a newbee in the workstation /server world.
> I am going to buy hardware to do biological modelling involving data
> input/output, R programming (an statistical language) and a few graphics
> visualization (some GIS).
You should look into some benchmarks analyzing the performance of
these CPUs for the kind of calculations that your R programming is
going to do (I'm unfamiliar with R so I can't help there).
Common sense would suggest 2 * 2GHz CPUs would blow the doors off 1 *
1GHz CPU, but you'll only be able to determine that by comparing
benchmark performance of the chips. Will your situation benefit from
SMP (dual CPUs) or not? I don't know. Does your system rely on
integer or floating point performance, and which of the two systems
offered excell in that kind of performance?
Think long and hard about the system's sub-systems too. It matters
very little how fast your processor(s) is/are if they're always
waiting for the reads/writes to/from disk to finish. Ditto for video,
though in the opposite direction (who cares how fast your video card is
if the drives can't serve video RAM fast enough?).
I like both Sun and Apple hardware, but they can be a tad expensive.
--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling
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