OT: replacement computer

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Richard Kreiss spoke thus:
> 
> Costco is offering an HP with AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core, *GB DDR3 memory,
> 1.5 TB Hard Drive, DVD-RW, Two 23" 1080P LED monitors for $999.00

I'm not an AMD fan, but that's actually a really good deal.  And AMD has
improved since the Athlon days--I still don't like them, though.  AMD has
funny ideas about doing things their way...sort of like MS's idea of
reinventing standards.  Almost every processor-specific tweak/fix to the
linux kernel over the years was necessitated by AMD chips, in the x86 tree.

My brother just got one with a hexacore.  Honestly, given that most apps
are still 32bit and will use no more than 2GB of RAM at a time, and that
even in gaming, true multicore multithreading engines aren't really common
(there are a plethora of pseudo ones, but real ones are scarce), mostly
what you're supporting is extreme multitasking, not performance.

If you tend to mostly do one thing at a time, look less at your core count
and more at your speed.  I'd take a quad at 3GHz over a hex at 2.4GHz, for
example.

Hell, the monitors alone make that deal really attractive.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.