if you are not gamer,
purely want to use linux for doing documents, writing software, internet,
do you need very powerful PC?
we can see intel/AMD are coming out with very powerful CPU/APU or whatever high end - 4-8 core processors,
it is nice to own a system running with latest technology CPU,
anyway, will it be a waste if you only run Linux on such system?
because linux always only need minimum hardware requirements.

Greetingz!

Bear in mind; every Operating System has "minimum system requirements" (heck, so do video games and most software). That doesn't mean you'll want to sit and wait 40 seconds to a whole minute for one document to load up in your favorite word processor (unless it's vim ).

Exposure to faster systems make most people impatient with their own.

we can see intel/AMD are coming out with very powerful CPU/APU or whatever high end - 4-8 core processors,
it is nice to own a system running with latest technology CPU,
anyway, will it be a waste if you only run Linux on such system?
because linux always only need minimum hardware requirements.

Yeah AMD is more reasonable and I haven't had any problems other than the fact that I enabled ECC on NON-ECC memory, which I never got a notification from roommate WINS7.
But I did get notification from DEBIAN SQUEEZE!

A: No.

The "No" is equally true of Windows *or* Linux.

Q: Does that mean that I should install Linux on an old piece of crap (and install Windows on my best PC)?

A: No.

One significant difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux tends to make much better use of the hardware you have

'Hope that helps

PS:
Interesting article you might enjoy:

it is nice to have latest 32nm CPU and high performance graphic card.
I tend to use Solidworks, Ansys to do simulation for Engineering problem,
even so, a dual core CPU with 2MB Ram machine can handle that.

in the future, definitely i will upgrade my PC, by then shall be 32nm CPU with 6 cores or more,
I dont know what to do with that? Other than 3D gaming???

@TigerLinux
There are already 6-core (HexCore) CPUs from AMD(45nm) and Intel (I can't find a good link). Do what I do; setup virtualization and run a few virtual computers inside. Great for testing things!

PhenomIIx6 1090T is very reasonable mine was $245.
I just looked at the link you have it showed $225

That depends. What do you want your system to do?

If you want to mess with Blender or play the latest Linux-compatible games then you need a high end system.

In my experience, if you're doing standard business type stuff, you don't need a powerful box. There are a few caveats.
1. Compiling takes power or time.
2. Give it memory.
3. Avoid bloatware (e.g. kde)
4. A poor video driver consumes resources under pressure.

I ran for a while on an amd i586 (~p90 approx) and the office/basic internet experience doesn't require more power, provided you avoid bloatware. You can write in OO or Abiword, or use m$ word under wine. The latter is taxing on resources. You can also end up with perl libs, python libs, X libs, gtk libs, and qt libs loaded if you're multitasking, so a little headroom on the ram is wise.

There is no point in buying your hardware in regard to your OS, except for compatibility. You should always choose your hardware according its purpose. Otherwise it will be a waste of money and energy. If you only do office stuff and surf the net you don't need powerful hardware. If you are a developer (compiling time sucks), or do much with graphics (Blender or photo-editing) or use more than one VM at a time it is very handy to have a powerful system.
It doesn't matter which OS you use, if you make fair comparisons (you can compare Windows 7 with Linux+KDE, but not Linux+Openbox or LXDE).

Hi,

As stated, you would define the needs then match things. Things are a changin...

Why think small? I can think of several applications for a processor with that many cores and Linux. Aerospace: Fly by wire redundancy, Medical: Life analysis and control instrumentation, BioChemical: Systems instrumentation & control... Imagination & innovation will be the limitations here as compared with today's technology. This technology will allow us to control systems with ease. System design will be the challenge along with peripheral subsystems for instrumentation interfacing.

Go to Warp Mr Sulu!

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Linux-General> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves. Not a Linux-Hardware question/discussion.

While it is true that most linux distributions can run well on old and crapy machines this can be true for Windows aswell, it all depends on what you are going to do with it.

My experience with multiple cores is that linux tends to profit more from the multiple cores then windows.

Windows has poor multi-threading support and most software is written to only support one core.
This is especially the case for games where maximum core speed is what you should be looking for.

One thing that makes windows really slow compared to linux is low memory ressources.

1 members found this post helpful.

You can't say it so general, while the multicore-support (especially with Hyperthreading) was poor in XP and Vista, they have fixed int in 7. An d from day to day more programs are written with multicore-support.

I don't think so, newer games have a huge benefit from multicore-CPUs, I have noticed it for example in GTA 4, changing from dual-core to quad-core gave me a huge increase in performance. I have not tried it, but especially simulation-type games (for example the newer parts of the Anno-series) also get a huge benefit from multicore (according to benchmarks).
The developers learn, nowadays, especially when a game also is released on consoles, it almost ever has multicore-support.

1 members found this post helpful.

Windows still tends to round robin threads too much on the different cores.

Games that REALLY support multithreading are still very rare. Most popular games today will still run better on a fast dualcore then quad- or hexacores because they profit more from core speed then core count.
The difference has been taken to a minimum because the core speed of the newer CPU has risen to a nearly equal speed.

Still on a windows platform I would prefer a dualcore with very high core speed then a quadcore with medium core speed even if the total cpu power is bigger.

I have 2 nearly identical machines at home the only difference are the CPUs and graphical adapter (both running windows 7 now) :
1. Dual opteron 8222, 16GB ECC reg RAM, ATI Radeon EAH 5770
2. Dual opteron 2214, 16GB ECC reg RAM, Nvidia 9800GT

When I switch off one CPU on the faster machine I see very few difference in speed compared to the second machine and most games will still run faster because of the higher core speed (3GHz vs 2.2GHz) while the total CPU speed has dropped from 12GHz to 6GHz (still having 2x3GHz from one CPU and I even lost 8GB of RAM since those depend on the second CPU) and you would think this is slower then the other machine that has a total of 8.8GHz CPU power (2x2x2.2GHz).

I assembled a nearly identical machine for a friend but he preferred quad cores CPU (I can't remember the exact CPU version but I know it was a quad 2.3GHz).
That machine had a total CPU power of 18.4GHz which is 50% more then my dual 8222, still in most applications and games my machine was clearly faster.
Only when we would run things like video conversions that take advantage of all cores his machine would be clearly faster.
As a result he ordered a set of 8224 which are dualcores with 3.2GHz of core speed because he mostly plays games and the quad cores are sitting in his drawer until games become more aware of mutliple cores (I guess those will never beused again since by that time those CPUs will become too old).