My current employer has given me the opportunity to design my own GIS workstation. The problem is I have no idea what is important when it comes to hardware! I have been given a datasheet from Fujitsu which includes the latest CELSIUS M720 series workstations but the configuration includes about 30 different processors, graphics cards, and hard drives.
I will be working a lot with the ESRI desktop suite (spatial analyst and 3D analyst) and doing a fair amount of raster processing (DEMs, visibility analysis, etc.), but I also use the GDAL library, SAGA-GIS, Quantum GIS and others. Does ArcGIS 10 actually use multiple cores?
I have the choice from 4 cores with 8 threads up to 8 cores with 8 threads - 16 threads?
Is SSD SATA III better than HDD SATA III?
The Celsius R920 supports up to 512 GB RAM. But what do I need?
It will probably be the last time I get a new workstation for the next 5 years, so I am curious what others have ordered or feel will be necessary for the coming years. Obviously the cloud isn't taking over as quick as they say!
Answer
I would absolutely get an SSD over a mechanical hard drive as your system boot drive and application installation drive. If you deal with processing large data sets, you may want to use the SSD for that too (or get a second SSD to use as a scratch disk). You will probably still need a larger mechanical HDD for storage.
ArcGIS 10 cannot use multiple cores except by running geoprocessing in the background as jlehtoma states, but that still only uses two cores (one for the ArcMap window, one for geoprocessing). So you're better off with a quad-core CPU that has a higher maximum CPU speed than with an 8- or 12-core server CPU with lower speeds for each core. I have an Intel Core i5-2500K overclocked to a 4.2 Ghz turbo speed (some Intel Core CPUs will run one core faster and shut down others when needed, Intel calls that 'turbo boost'). I would NOT go with a Xeon processor if ArcGIS is your main software.
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