[rescue] Advice on Octanes

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 11:00:18AM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> Once in a while you can find a deal on a R12k-300.  I found mine just
> shy of a year ago for USD$230.  The market seems to still be supporting
> roughly a USD$400 price on those.
> 
> Since I use mostly single-user apps on my Octane, a single R12k was my
> first choice.

Generally dual CPU would be my first choice, especially given how cool
APO is.  But there are enough things that I want to do that scream for
an R12k that I'll probably go single R12k over dual R10k.  

Off the top of my head, Open Office is probably much better on an R12k
(although maybe just a 250 2meg r10k would be enough improvement over my
1 meg 195mhz chip).  A lot of the video playback programs for mpeg2 and
mpeg4 files really want an R12k.  Apparently, even plain MPEG2 at DVD
bit rates are rather hard for R10ks (again, the 250 with 2 megs of L2
would probably be a major improvement, but in this case, I don't think
it would leave a lot of CPU power to spare).  Console emulators and
video games also seem to benefit a lot from an R12k.  Those aren't my
biggest uses for a computer, but some games are nicer in an emulator
than on the original console, and sometimes I get a hankering to play a
quake like game.

Generally, the software I write is what uses my workstations the
hardest.  Generally that software is fairly easy to parallelize.  But,
in this case, I think a single CPU is likely to win out until I can
afford a dual R12k.  In the mean time, maybe I'd go with a single proc
Octane for my workstation, and a dual R10k connected via crossover GigE,
or something like that.  Of course, the cost of 2 GigE cards (if I can't
hack generics to work) and two card cages plus a dual R10k starts
looking like the price of a dual R12k module...