Andys Computer

This time last year I switched back to the Mac after using Linux as my primary desktop operating system for several years. I am still very much a Mac fan, however I do find that software development, particularly software that will ultimately run on a Linux server, is easier to do on Linux, and software development is my plan for 2023. I do have a 4 year old laptop I could press into service, but from time to time I might like to boot into Windows and play a bit of Cities Skylines again and the laptop isn't up to gaming, so instead I decided to go with a new x86 box. Typically I build my own computers so I started to price up a machine with a modern CPU, graphics card and so on but as ever I was getting carried away and the price soon crept well over $2,000. I also wasn't keen on having an overpowered tower on my desk again, so I looked into building a smaller form factor unit, the smallest Mini-ITX I could find and scaling back the parts appropriately to avoid over heating it....

    I decided to build a system using the last, and fastest, single core desktop CPU ever made: the Intel Celeron G470 from 2013. This Celeron was a bargain basement CPU back in 2013 and thus got no real attention or love, but it represents the end of a nearly 50 year era in "micro" or "personal" computing, an era that began back in the mid 70's with home computer kits that featured a single CPU, or core in today's speak, running the entire system. Unlike the earlier AMD Sempron 145, the Celerson G470 does have hyper threading, so it appears as two logical CPU's to your operating system, but make no mistake, there is just a single core on there sitting behind a thread scheduler. AMD introduced the first multi-core CPU on the desktop in 2005 (although  multi core CPU's have been around for decades as concepts and in specialty applications)  and frankly I'm surprised there was sufficient commercial incentive to introduce a...