Most new computers being purchased by CFHT are Intel-based. In fact, almost all of them were a single model from Dell based on the Pentium III and Intel chipsets. They have proven to be very versatile. They fill the role of Display Host, Session Host, and Detector Host well. This makes the individual machines (and the parts inside) act more as building blocks than hardware purchased for a specific task. While the extremely competitive PC market has some products with the wrong corners cut, properly engineered hardware is not so difficult to find. We opt out of most maintenance contracts and put the total saved toward buying complete redundant spares to cover potential failures. Over several years of purchasing dozens of workstations, none have had system failures (power supplies, CPU fans, or other) and a small percentage of hard drives which were purchased separately have developed problems.
With any approach to purchasing computer hardware, it helps to have an understanding of the factors which can affect critical machines adversely, especially those at the summit:
Approval for use at the high elevation of Mauna Kea (4200m) is not always easy to find, so we often are left to determine that one experimentally on our own. We have had consumer-grade PCs (serving functions not related to operations) at the Summit for years and experienced very few problems with them.
IA32 (Pentium) computers, even different models from the same manufacturer, can be leagues apart in reliability and design. The top ones are comparable to workstations from Sun and Hewlett Packard, but lower in cost, especially when considering upgrades. Because ``PC'' designs also have the momentum and competition of the very large consumer PC market behind them, we're counting on the processors and architectures to continue to be a driving force in the future. This means we make a software system that runs at an acceptable speed today, and PC companies do the work for us to make it run faster in the future.