Nov 272009
 

Trying to search online for an affordable 8-cores machine, but now I’m asking myself – why?

Well, one of the most obviously reason is that if I can have one powerful machine, I can retire 2 or 3 machines at home, include one P4 desktop from year 2003, one PowerBook from year 2004, and one P4 laptop from year 2005 (this one is actually in question).

I found out that I need this many machines just because I need to test all those multiple host development and deployment. What could be ideal to me, is that I can have 8~10 hosts running in two separated network, so I can test more than what I’m playing now.

Actually I should not expect for a 8-core box as it will be pretty expensive (haven’t locked down price yet), based on my experience with current dual-core machine, it seems a 4-core box can satisfy me – it will be able to run 8~10 VMs but I need at least 8G memory, and if it is 12G then all data VMs can run at 1G mem which will be more like a real world.

So I should forget about 8-core machine unless someday Intel or AMD roll out a single 8-core CPU for desktop. It seems to me the most reasonable plan to consolidate computers at home is getting a new iMac, let it be the home desktop, running all photo/video editing, storage massive data, etc, and take the current home desktop (which is a 4-core desktop) and then retire the PowerBook (maybe leave it running somewhere? Anyway it does not occupy too much space) and the P4 box, and turning current dual-core machine as the second Window machine at home, pity I don’t think it can run Windows 7.

  One Response to “Dream of a 8-core machine … but why?”

  1. After 3 and half years waiting, now I have a 8-core laptop, though it was actually a 4-core i7 with HT enabled …

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