Do linux users need very powerful PC?

dugan · 01-25-2011, 01:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

Compiling takes power or time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

If you are a developer (compiling time sucks)

The best way to minimize compilation time is not to get a powerful CPU or even a fast hard drive. It is, rather, to get a huge amount of RAM (as much as possible) and then do all of your compiling on a tmpfs-mounted RAM drive.

This is a consideration for distros where you're expected to build much of your software from source. This includes source-based distros, of course, but also distros like Slackware, where the most common way to get third party software is to download and run a premade build script.

TobiSGD · 01-25-2011, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan

The best way to minimize compilation time is not to get a powerful CPU or even a fast hard drive. It is, rather, to get a huge amount of RAM (as much as possible) and then do all of your compiling on a tmpfs-mounted RAM drive.

This will of course also bring a hugh benefit in performance, but if you can compile for example a kernel or something similar with make -j8 or even -j12 on a six-core machine, you will see the difference to a make -j3 or -j4 on a dual-core CPU. Building LFS will speed up much this way.

TigerLinux · 01-25-2011, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dani1973

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).

interesting,
dual core CPUs are still in the market,
but i believe manufacturer will phase out dual core and increasingly selling 4-6 core CPUs.

TobiSGD · 01-25-2011, 07:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TigerLinux

interesting,
dual core CPUs are still in the market,
but i believe manufacturer will phase out dual core and increasingly selling 4-6 core CPUs.

You can also still buy single core CPUs, so I think it will need a little bit longer till dual-cores will fade out off the market. They are good for many purposes, like office-PCs, HTPCs or surf-stations, and even good enough for the occasional gamer. Ask around here, I would assume that here are more members that use single- and dual-core systems than members that use CPUs with four or more cores in their every day PCs.

onebuck · 01-25-2011, 07:51 PM

Hi,

I'm still wanting for that 100 core backplane.

But, yes single or multi-core machines are necessary for the targeted market. Each of us have different wants and needs.

Dani1973 · 01-26-2011, 07:36 AM

The recent quad- and hexacores tend to come close to the core speeds of the faster dualcores when you take into account the turbo boost but imho it still doesn't perform as well as the older CPUs having the 'real core speed' and the cost of those new CPUs is mostly very high.
I am pretty sure that technology will be improving even more soon and the older CPUs will get totally obsolete not only because of core speed but especially because of power management.

PS : don't get me wrong, the new mutlicores are mostly faster then the older CPUs but when it comes to single threaded applications this isn't always the case.