On Sun, Jun 21 2015, James wrote: > Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes: > >> Allan Gottlieb writes: >> >> > The hardest decision is size vs performance, but I know you can't help > > Maybe, maybe not.
Perhaps I was unclear. I simply meant that clearly higher performance is better and so is a smaller/lighter laptop. The trade-off seems to be a matter for personal preference. >> > 1. Graphics. >> > I can afford a high-end graphics co-processor, but prefer the >> > software/administrative simplicity of intel graphics. I do not >> > play high speed games or otherwise run graphics intensive >> > applications. Am I correct in believing that Linux (the kernel) >> > supports (the dell option) >> > Intel Core i7-5600U Processor, UMA graphics, Smart Card >> > directly with no extra gentoo package needed? > > Cuda on nvidia is well seasoned, but expensive. Gentoo distros such as > Pentoo, use cuda for smokin fast passwd cracking. Many/most apps > will benefit, in the near future, with the deployment of GCC-5.x as RDMA via > gcc% will allow for using that smoking GPU (a simd processor) and the DDR5 > ram as if it was part of the CPU/ram resources. If you read up on all the > advances with GCC 5 you will see most gpu (amd, Intel etc) will/should be > supported. How long for stabilization, is unknown, at this time. But > for very few dollars it's the biggest thing to hit hardware, since the FPU > was integrated onto the same die, imho. YMMV. > > Check whatever GPU you select for the amount of its own (discrete) DDR5 > memory on the GPU (card). > >> So on the whole, my experience with higher-end Dell is that hardware is >> pretty much well-supported across the boards with very few gotchas. The >> only two exceptions would be wifi cards (cheap to fix) and maybe GPU >> co-processor (if you are unlucky to get an unsupported cutting edge one >> and need to wait a bit for Linux support to catch up). > > I'd check around on the precise details of the GPU before purchase. > Some GPU use the general system ram, and that is a severe > (buss-bandwidth) bottleneck that really dampens performance on many > softwares. The looming gcc-5 is a game changer on using video > resources, as general system resources... I doubt that gcc 5 (or 6) will extract much parallelism that Cuda can exploit for my primary use cases: compiling (largely gentoo) sources and running emacs. I have learned that the high end graphic coprocessors (or GPUs as they are now called) carry a significant administrative overhead, at least for gentoo. Thanks for responding, allan
