Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 09:56:05AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 12:00:23PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > > But why would you spend over 1000 pounds on an arm Linux desktop box
> > > instead of a few hundred pounds on a random i386 desktop box?
> > Because you don't want a 100+W dissipating screaming monster on your desk ?
>
> You can get low power x86 systems that have much better performance (> 1
> GHz).
Name one. I don't see any x86 which comes even close to a 64bit MIPS
SOC at 1GHz, with Gigabit Ethernets and Memory controller on-die, and
a maximum power consumption of 5 W (Core alone ~3.5 W).
The closest I know of is the VIA Eden with an advertized TDP (Core only)
of 7 W and the real maximum above that. They list only active cooling as
certified, it is 32bit only, the L2 cache is smaller, the FPU is slower,
and integer performance is also lower.
> > > A reasonable answer is because you're developing for arm's for embedded
> > > applications; but if so, what's the big deal with using unstable or
> > > snapshots, and running your public servers on other boxes?
> >
> > Because using unstable is not a workable solution. Try to make a daily
> > unstable install, and count how many days it is broken on the tier1 arches,
> > and see how worse it can become on tier2 slower arches.
>
> Most work for embedded systems would be cross-compiled from faster
> systems anyway.
The price for that is a serious lack of testing. Debian stable provides
known good binaries.
Thiemo
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