Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 15 Apr 2002 02:36:03 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 15 Apr 2002 02:36:02 -0400 Received: from pc132.utati.net ([216.143.22.132]:60566 "HELO merlin.webofficenow.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Mon, 15 Apr 2002 02:36:00 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Rob Landley To: Alan Cox Subject: Re: linux as a minicomputer ? Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2002 20:37:22 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3.1] In-Reply-To: Cc: ldavidsen@tmr.com, hpa@zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin), linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Message-Id: <20020415065501.3A687740@merlin.webofficenow.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sunday 14 April 2002 09:45 am, Alan Cox wrote: > > cheap system, but dual Celeron? The last dual Celeron m/b I saw was the > > BP6, and I have a bunch of them in various places. Is that the board > > you're remembering? It uses CPUs no longer available. > > There are much newer dual Celeron boards. Maybe they just don't sell them > in the USA any more ? You can get a dual athlon motherboard down at fry's for about $180, cash and carry. (I was there the day before yesterday, they had tyan tiger, tyan thunder, and some kind of Asus. I believe the $180 one was the tyan tiger...) Add 512k DDR 2100 SDRAM (I believe the newspaper said it was on sale for around $110), a 160 gig maxtor ide drive (~$200 after mail-in rebate), throw it in a case... Trust me, two 1.4 ghz athlons is PLENTY of CPU power. That's just about enough CPU power to compress mp4 video in realtime. (We've got one here doing just that, although we haven't tried feeding a live video signal into it, I so dunno how much buffering it would neet to avoid dropping frames, or what kind of latency spikes we're talking about...) In terms of use as a workstation... 2800 mhz divided by 7 people is 400 mhz each. Not that it really quite works that way, but if you think giving them a 400 mhz system of their own is reasonable (minus L1 cache contention, plus DDR SDRAM/faster FSB, and the three execution cores in an athlon...) The killer is that if one person drives the machine into swap, performance melts down for everybody. THAT is what makes the idea of a multi-headed linux box as a many-way shared workstation seem a lot less workable to me. (I'll admit swap behavior sucks a lot less than it used to, but is this an endorsement? There's no attempt at all to make swapping fair with multiple users on a box. Maybe rmap will help here...) Rob - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/