[Adium-devl] Hardware plans

[Peter Hosey]

On Aug 19, 2007, at 14:33:31, Evan Schoenberg wrote:
>  * Upgrade the processor.  In the current gen, that'd be either  
> 2x2.66ghz dual core Xeon or 2x3.0 dual core Xeon.

Let's not forget about parallelism. With no discounts (acknowledging  
Chris' previous statements), here's what store.apple.com offers:

	Mac mini
	2 GHz Core 2 Duo
	2 GiB RAM
	One of those:    $949 USD
	Three of those: $2847 USD
	Four of those:  $3796 USD
	Five of those:  $4745 USD
	Six of those:   $5694 USD

	Xserve
	2×2 2 GHz Xeon
	2 GiB RAM
	$3298 USD

	Xserve
	2×2 2 GHz Xeon
	4 GiB RAM
	$3698 USD

	Xserve
	2×2 3 GHz Xeon
	2 GiB RAM
	$5097 USD

	Xserve
	2×2 3 GHz Xeon
	4 GiB RAM
	$5497 USD

Stated differently, with numbers of cores:

	Mac mini×1	 $949	2
	Mac mini×3	$2847	6
	Xserve 2×2GHz 2GiB	$3298	4
	Xserve 2×2GHz 4GiB	$3698	4
	Mac mini×4	$3796	8
	Mac mini×5	$4745	10
	Xserve 2×3GHz 2GiB	$5097	4
	Xserve 2×3GHz 4GiB	$5497	4
	Mac mini×6	$5694	12

So, let's compare configs with similar prices: Although the minis'  
Core 2 Duo processors may be slower than Xeons (although that's pure  
speculation), we'd have one-and-a-half times as many as an otherwise  
similar configuration (three minis vs 2×2 GHz/2 GiB Xserve), and  
three times as many than an Xserve with more clock cycles and maybe  
RAM (six minis vs 2×3 GHz Xserve).

The questions, then, are:

1. Could distcc on a cluster of minis make up the loss of clock  
cycles with pure parallelism, being able to compile 12 source files  
at a time rather than four?

(Keeping in mind, of course, that it will take some fraction of a  
second longer for each compiler process to finish, and that that  
fraction must currently be multiplied by 608—this being the sum of  
500, which is the number of .m files in the Adium project, and 108,  
which is the number of .m files in the AIUtilities project.)

2. Would 2 GiB of RAM be enough for each distributed-build node?

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