[R] optimal hardware for computations in R?

[Amit Ghosh]

Hi,

I am planning to buy a new PC for computing simulations in R under
Linux. I was searching the web/mailing list-archives for useful hints
about the "optimal" choice of hardware - surprisingly I found no recent
topics.

As far as I know, R doesn't use threads, so I think that there should be
no benefit in choosing a dual-processor machine.

So the remaining affordable choices seems to be Athlon XP, Pentium 4,
Xeon or Athlon64/Opteron. Are there any R-related benchmarks or should
one simply look about the "standard" benchmark-results (SPEC, etc.)? Any
hints or experiences would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Amit