[nmglug] hardware discussion: desktops, high performance, possibly fanless

[Mark Galassi]

    Arlo> For the past week I have been drooling over https://puri.sm
    Arlo> after someone posted it [...]

Sadly I don't see any desktops there - pity, they look slick.

My most important question is how to evaluate a desktop computer's
performance from the numbers given.  I'm looking at about 8cores, 32gig,
no disk (I already have a bunch).  I would look at price once I see
options and understand the following question better:

    Mark> And talking about specs, what does a core mean anyway these
    Mark> days?  In the days of hyperthreading it appears that
    Mark> /proc/cpuinfo can give twice as many cores as the hardware
    Mark> specs, but with half the gigahertz.  I'm not asking anyone to
    Mark> actually explain it -- what I'm asking is if there is a small
    Mark> set of numbers labeled on h/w which will give me an idea of
    Mark> single-taks performance and parallel performance.