You can get a dual athlon motherboard down at fry's for about $180, cash and
carry. (I was there the day before yesterday, they had tyan tiger, tyan
thunder, and some kind of Asus. I believe the $180 one was the tyan tiger...)
Add 512k DDR 2100 SDRAM (I believe the newspaper said it was on sale for
around $110), a 160 gig maxtor ide drive (~$200 after mail-in rebate), throw
it in a case...
Trust me, two 1.4 ghz athlons is PLENTY of CPU power. That's just about
enough CPU power to compress mp4 video in realtime. (We've got one here
doing just that, although we haven't tried feeding a live video signal into
it, I so dunno how much buffering it would neet to avoid dropping frames, or
what kind of latency spikes we're talking about...)
In terms of use as a workstation... 2800 mhz divided by 7 people is 400 mhz
each. Not that it really quite works that way, but if you think giving them
a 400 mhz system of their own is reasonable (minus L1 cache contention, plus
DDR SDRAM/faster FSB, and the three execution cores in an athlon...)
The killer is that if one person drives the machine into swap, performance
melts down for everybody. THAT is what makes the idea of a multi-headed
linux box as a many-way shared workstation seem a lot less workable to me.
(I'll admit swap behavior sucks a lot less than it used to, but is this an
endorsement? There's no attempt at all to make swapping fair with multiple
users on a box. Maybe rmap will help here...)
Rob
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