On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 07:36:36PM -0800, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > On Nov 9, 2007 5:47 PM, Stewart C. Strait <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm looking for a new (or possibly used) desktop machine, probably > > toward the low end of the price spectrum. Does anyone have > > suggestions for hardware or San Diego area retailers? Links or Google > > search ideas are also welcome. > > > > Chips and Memory is advertising machines with Asus M2N-MX SE > > motherboards. Are these desirable or troublesome? > > > > I'll probably be installing Ubuntu or Debian. MS Windows will not be > > present. > > > > It's important for the machine to run fairly quietly in room > > temperatures up to about 90 degrees F (32 degrees C). Highly > > CPU-intensive jobs will be run occasionally, but small speed > > improvements are not worth significant money to me. These jobs > > usually access memory in unpredictable ways, so caching is less > > effective than usual. The existing machine, with a 1.4 GHz Athlon > > processor, is adequate, but I presume much greater speed is available > > cheaply. > > > > Do you do anything that would benefit from a 64-bit word? I have just > in the past few days discovered that my new laptop with 2GHz AMD > 64-bit Turion is almost twice the speed on bit-map intensive programs > as the desktop with 2.8GHz Pentium 4. (32-bit). ...
Nothing obvious comes to mind that would benefit from a 64-bit word. My typical CPU-intensive code usually is dominated by 32-bit probability and frequency data, together with 8-bit ciphertext and trial plaintext data (usually with values between 0 and 25 inclusive, representing 'a' through 'z'). I'm assuming pointers are 32-bit. When I'm doing signal processing instead of hobby crypto, the 8-bit or mod 26 stuff goes away, but I seldom have 64-bit data. Thanks Stewart Strait -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
