When I run Gazebo and rviz on my Athlon 64 3500 (one core) 5 year old machine running Kubuntu Lucid 32-bit,

the cturtle looks more like a c-snail. With CPU at 100% all the time, I see updates in rviz about every 5 seconds.

So it takes about 30 minutes to get across a hall of WG.

Which is not that much fun, and now I'm looking at the ways to improve this situation:

a) Upgrade processor to dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 (dual core) and install 64-bit Linux.

b) Run Gazebo on another machine

c) Get a new AMD Phenom II X6 (six cores) machine

d) Try to mess with performance of Gazebo as outlined by John here: http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/cpu-usage-of-Gazebo-td911241.html#a913849

I searched this list for AMD/Athlon and did not find much.

I'm guessing that's because WG uses Intel Quad Core i7 Xeon processors.

What would you guys recommend?

I understand it's hard to recommend PC hardware, but I'm asking here to get a feel of what would be a good solution that will get me going with ROS for another couple of years.

So far my impression is ROS is highly multi-process system and probably going to get even more so in the near future. Thus I was looking for a CPU with more cores. Am I going in the right direction?

Thank you for your time,

Alex