OT: Recommended Linux Laptops, suppliers?

[Cliff Wells]

On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 19:39, Brian Quinlan wrote:
> > True.  That was the example I had in hand.  For a couple hundred more
> I
> > can find you a Sony Viao with undoubtedly better specs.
> 
> That would be better. At least that would have firewire too :-)

In the PC world, firewire is more of a convenience than a necessity. 
Especially with USB 2.0.  My Gf's Dell has firewire and it collects dust
bunnys.

> > > Are you sure that a 1GHz G4 is slower than a 2GHz Celeron? I'm not.
> > 
> > I am.  Despite Apple's claims, the G4 is not that fast.  My graphic
> > artist friends (who often use both platforms) will concur. Is a 800MHz
> > PowerPC faster than a 900MHz PIII?  Yes, for some things.  Is it
> faster
> > than a 2GHz <insert any CPU here>? Er, keep it real.  
> 
> I'm using the following Tom's Hardware chart for my calculations:
> http://tinyurl.com/7o76
> 
> It seems that, using the motherboard, a 2GHz Celeron is about 20% slower
> than a 2GHz P4. 

But still pretty fast <wink>.

> I can't really do the same comparison between a PIII and a P4 since they
> never appeared on the same motherboards, but I thought that P4 was
> slower than PIII, clock for clock, because to allow for higher clock
> speeds, the P4 needed a very deep pipeline. Anybody know?

The early P4's were.  The new ones (Hyperthreading) aren't.

> In other news, here are some VERY old pystone results:
> 
> These are the most resent pystone 
> Celeron 500 (FreeBSD 4)
> Pystone(1.1) time for 10000 passes = 1.72
> This machine benchmarks at 5818.18 pystones/second
> 
> G4/400
> Pystone(1.1) time for 10000 passes = 1.5
> This machine benchmarks at 6666.67 pystones/second

And this is my point: with a 100MHz clock difference, the G4 is faster
(which implies a more efficient design), but if you extrapolate this out
to a 1GHz difference (or 1.8 GHz, which is the current gap) the G4 is
clearly going to be the loser.  If the G4 were available at 2.0GHz it
would be a contender, at 1GHz it isn't.  It's similar with the AMD chips
(which I use).  They're a bit more efficient than the Intel equivalent
but lag a bit in clock speed.

> > Remote display, for one thing.  This might not matter much to many
> > people, but the ability to remotely run a graphical application
> matters
> > *a lot* to me.
> 
> Quartz is remote displayable.

Ah.  Excellent.  Does it require another Apple to do the remote display
or special software on the client?

> 
> > I would think that using PDF would have been independent
> > of whether they use X or not.
> 
> The Mac OS X display server renders streams of PDF sent by the
> application. Where you would layer X in such a scheme? Above X so you
> pay a massive performance price converting high-level PDF primitives to
> low-level X primitives or below it so applications are reduced to using
> X primitives?
> 
> Here is a brief overview of Mac OS X graphics:
> http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/macos-x-dp4/macos-x-dp4-4.html

I'll check it out.  I've been curious about it.

-- 
Cliff Wells, Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308  (800) 735-0555 x308