On 04/11/11 17:50, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 1:32 PM, David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote: [...] >> Well, I know why *I* would get one: it's cheap. > > would you be interested in anything that has a higher bang-per-buck > ratio? or just cheaper? (or both) Absolutely! Note that I was *criticising*, merely pointing out different value frameworks. > details on the allwinner A10 are emerging, but they include: [...] > so, what would you be prepared to pay for something with the above > specs, especially given that it will have the GPL source code > available in advance, and you'd have an indirect line to the > manufacturer and the factory to get relevant questions answered if you > wanted "in" at the very early stages. Hmm. $0-$50, I'd probably fling cash at you. $50-$100, out of my spending bracket for toys so would need to consider my precise requirements. >$100, I'd still be interested but would probably wait for the next iteration to make sure that no nasty first gen faults appeared. All subject to shipping, of course. My particular use case is that I run cowlark.com off a single SheevaPlug, which is doing a sterling job but suffers badly from too much I/O going down its single USB2 port, and isn't a particularly meaty processor to begin with. I'd very much like to upgrade to something with, like, an FPU. [...] > *sigh* it's a matter of power. the architecture of separate ICs > (usually northbridge/southbridge) simply doesn't work for this level > of ultra-low-power. I was actually rather thinking of integrated GPUs; I'm aware the external ones suck, being mostly designed for the PC market where you're only cool if your PC is doubling as a space heater. For my day job I do a lot of work with the more exotic Android devices (including MIPS ones). The one thing these all have in common is the total lack of quality of the vendor-provided OpenGL stacks. Prior to Android Gingerbread, for example, it was trivial to crash the entire phone by e.g. for one chipset, calling glReadPixels() on a 32-bit EGL config. (Gingerbread's much more robust. I've had a few strange reboots but nothing I could replicate.) Go back a few years and ask game developers about OpenGL stacks on Brew and Symbian and things are even worse; you'll probably end up with them curled up in a corner. So (even though I don't have an immediate requirement for one), the idea of a GPU, integrated or otherwise, which has a properly open source GL stack where these bugs can be *found* and *fixed* is very attractive. Plus, of course, if there's a programmable shader pipeline, having a documented ISA for the GPU processor makes it easier to abuse. -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ │ "Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, it's just the │ opposite." --- John Kenneth Galbrith
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