Syntactic Bay Leaves

I was briefly tempted by the various Black Friday marketing to get a PS3 to play some of the sweet exclusives coming out, like Uncharted 2 or Demon Souls, but instead I think I’m going to upgrade my home app server. Currently I’m running Ubuntu Jaunty on an old school Pentium 3 that my old company was going to throw out and it’s kind of showing it’s age. It can’t play Flash videos without st-st-stuttering, and for some reason doing anything causes 100% iowait.

So I read up on the state of the consumer CPU market and hit up good ol Newegg so see what I could come up with. It seems like quad core CPUs are within reasonable price, so I tried to see if I could whip up a nice system.

My goal was lots of CPUs (for ERLANG) and something that wouldn’t break the bank if I left it on all day, so low power usage. That brought me to AMD’s new 45nm Phenom II X4, which benchmarked well for energy efficiency and good price/performance ratio. Here’s what the rest of my rig is gonna look like: Newegg wishlist.