[LAU] Advice needed: hardware vendors

[Charles Z Henry]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 1:59 AM, Patrick Shirkey
<pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, April 8, 2014 3:44 pm, Chris Metzler wrote:
>>
>> In the past, I've sorta DIY'd my home machines -- sorta because it's
>> been more integration than building. Most of the parts would come from
>> some vendor like Newegg; but the processor+cooling/motherboard/memory
>> would come from the now long-departed Monarch Computer.  The part of
>> building that scared me was doing a good job coupling the heatsink to
>> the processor; Monarch sold processor/motherboard combos where they'd
>> taken care of that, and tested the combo to make sure it was happy
>> before sending it to you.

Don't worry too much.  Attaching the CPU and heatsink is not difficult
and poses no serious risks.  Use only an amount of thermal grease
about the size of a grain of cooked rice and don't spread.


> If you want a well supported board then you should probably stay away from
> AMD. They are getting worse not better. But if you do choose AMD the
> fusion chips offer reasonable performance vs cost/power consumption. Just
> don't expect any real support from AMD. Even the open source drivers are
> developed by NVidia devs in their spare time.

I've been curious about building an AMD APU system.  For those who
don't know about the recently released APU's: AMD's Kaveri line
features a shared memory architecture for CPU and GPU, which
eliminates data transfer (and the need for code that explicitly pins
memory for the GPU).  It's a very interesting step forward for General
Purpose Graphical Processing Unit (GPGPU) computing using OpenCL, as
it eliminates the single biggest bottleneck for GPGPU.  Only the first
two Kaveri chips have been released so far, and the benchmarks have
been underwhelming.  Still, keep an eye out.

The OpenCL libraries are provided by AMD with their proprietary
driver--this is always the case, as OpenCL is an open standard, not an
open source project.