My desktop is back. Evidently, one [of three] PCI-Express x16 lanes is dead as is one of the memory channels. The system refuses to POST with something occupying any of the damaged connectors. This leaves two [though one inaccessible] PCI-Express x16 slots and one memory channel still viable. I can make do with this configuration for the time being.
The experience has prompted the question of what I want in a home desktop. While there was a time when GPU VSIPL development and benchmarking demanded a high-end system, now I do most work on other resources purchased by the research budget. I don't game, and I do most home development on my laptop which is typically booted into Linux. I wouldn't have a need for Windows at all except to synchronize my iPhone, though it's nice to have that kind of compatibility for special interests and the occasional foray into 3D graphics programming. That said, a low-end multicore CPU and medium-range GPU could satisfy those needs quite well.
With a medium-performance laptop dual booting Windows and Linux, do I need the desktop at all?
The strongest reason I can see for wanting one is to have a stable place for an array of harddrives to ensure reliable access to a decade or so of accumulated data. That's a task easily serviced by network-attached storage [1].
This has disturbing implications for the value of my research interests at the consumer level...
[1] BUT NOT IF IT'S MADE BY LACIE - you're better off keeping your data on floppy disks under your mattress than shoveling it into that black hole of a storage medium; it's a place where entropy goes to die; fail fail fail.
1 comment:
HA! indeed. I was thinking about that last night.
The Ipad and equivalents will not have that much time. A handheld network device that you might use to surf the internet while sitting in your living room while sort-of watching tv, was $40 for an older generation on ebay(touch screen and all). How can you compete? I suppose you make the battery non-removable so that you have to replace the $400 device.
I bought my parents the lowest tier computer that I could buy them, and it is still more power than they need.
My current desktop is from 2002, and it is doing just fine, I worry more about parts failing than the lack of performance.
If you don't play games (high end graphics) or do nuclear explosion simulations (lots of number crunching), the super fast gpus don't make sense as they have cheap ones that are embedded now that can handle a few video streams overlayed on each other.
[well duh, as that is what they are designed for, massive number crunching]
At a certain point, if you have the bandwidth and latency of a vga connection, then you don't need to have very much computing resources on the computer that you are using.
GPUs for the cloud?
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