Yes, We Have No Bananas

So, I was all set to buy myself a nice new 8-core Bulldozer system with 16GB of RAM and a whole bunch of disks when (a) Bulldozer a.k.a. AMD's FX processor family turned out to be not that hot except heat-wise, and (b) a quarter of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity found itself at the bottom of a lake that hadn't been there yesterday.

Seagate drive prices have jumped 30% already, while Western Digital - the ones currently swimming with the fishes - have jumped 40%.  Kind of annoying on the eve of my purchasing a dozen or more.

The other other thing is the pending launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge E, which, when coupled with the right motherboard (that being Gigabyte's GA-X79-UD5) supports 14 disk drives and 32GB of RAM.  Which would let me run my little virtual cloud right on my desktop.

On the fourth hand, the server version of Bulldozer can support a lot more than 32GB of RAM, and I do want to have a desktop Bulldozer to see if the server version is a good option.  On the fifth hand, the low-end serverdozers (the Opteron 4200 family) haven't shown up yet.  On the sixth hand, they're close - a 3GHz (baseline) 8-core dual-socket chip looks set to cost $360. which ain't bad, about the same as the current 2.8GHz 6-core Opteron 4100.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:12 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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