Yes to the more reasonable px/performance of a desktop/server Linux backend for HPC. OTOH, if you were doing OpenCL instead of CUDA, the i5 would happily run t

Yes to the more reasonable px/performance of a desktop/server Linux backend for HPC. OTOH, if you were doing OpenCL instead of CUDA, the i5 would happily run that as an OpenCL target (albeit more slowly), so that you could do compilation/test dev on any newish laptop.