Dirk Gorissen wrote:
Hello, I have the luxury of being allowed to buy myself a new computer for my work at university (phd student). Needless to say it will run openSUSE :) However I am not really up to date as to what CPU arch to choose, especially one well supported by linux. I was hoping maybe the list could give me a few tips.
I would like something new enough but dont want to run the risk of having to custom compile lots of things or dealing with obscure platform issues. My OS should facilitate my work, not be the work... Also if it is too cutting edge integration with other systems could be difficult.
The PC shall be used for lots of programming (matlab/java/C++) and compute intensive simulations so compilation and compute speed are pretty important. So I guess I should lean towards 64bit? Or maybe the new dual cores? People have told me AMD is the way to go?
Any tips are appreciated, Cheers Dirk
Depending on how much "cpu intensive" work you do and youd budget, Opteron or Power. IBM's thrown its wait behind Linux on Power, and for a long time the only OS choice at all form AMD-64 was Linux. I think youwill a) Find examples of each in a fairly modest budget b) Find examples of each in the world's top 500 supercomputers. In Intel Xeon from IBM is probably worth a look: IBM has its own chipset, and it performs better than Intel's. However, I'm inclined towards AMD over Intel. If you ise AMD-64 or compatible, also look at Interl's icc: it can save a truckload of CPU.