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I have a Trimslice Dev-Kit (I'm a Gentoo developer) and I have one of the 32GB on order. There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main

I have a Trimslice Dev-Kit (I'm a Gentoo developer) and I have one of the 32GB on order. There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main point I want to address is the "equivalent to a pentium 3"; this is definitely not the case. Just because it is a dual core running at 1ghz doesn't mean it's slow. In fact most ARM machines are slower than their equivalent chips, but not as much as people would think. An example is the EfikaMX (Cortex A-8 @ 800MHz) runs only ~20% slower than an Atom clocked at 1.6GHz. But at a fraction of the power usage. My apartment is full of ARM machines and I have a build farm of ~20 that are compiling software (Ubuntu and Gentoo) 24/7 and my power bill was 40 dollars. They also generate much less heat, and don't require fans, and most run off integrated SSD drives (PATA and SATA) so there are no moving parts at all in them. And... They are cheap. I can get a brand new ARM based netbook for 200 dollars that gives me ~ the equivalent processing of an Atom netbook of the same price... Except the Atom netbook is a refurb. Cheaper, lower power consumption, and almost the same processing power. It works for me, sure I can't use proprietary software, or something like dropbox that requires a proprietary daemon, but I don't really miss it much. At first you notice but as you use it more, you come to realize that you really didn't need it. Sorry if this was a huge wall of text, I am responding via my phone.

angusgr 15y ago
There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main point I want to address is the "equivalent to a pentium 3"; this is definitely not the case. Just because it is a dual core running at 1ghz doesn't mean it's slow I meant the analogy the other way. That the USB stick computer is the Pentium 3 equivalent and the Trimslice is "four generations along the line", something like the Core 2 Duo. Believe me, I'm extremely excited about the performance/costs power nexus of these new ARM cores. :). And well jealous of your Cortex-A8 build farm. (I did get at least one thing wrong in my reply, which is I somehow thought the USB stick computer was ARM9 not ARM11. So it's only 3 generations of ARM before the Cortex A-9, and that's disregarding all the other lesser-used ARM cores that came between.) PS Please don't make sweeping statements like There are probably other things incorrect in your comment, that's just plain rude.
steevdave 15y ago
It won't let me respond to your comment, and you're right, I shouldn't have made that comment. I do apologize, and apparently misread the comment. Hopefully people can look past both things and realize that there is more to ARM than just "omg the processor isn't as fast as a quad core i7"; That said, I'm also looking forward to this board and hope it makes it stateside. I love ARM (if you couldn't tell), and the main thing holding it back is the lack of people who are familiar with it. Since it's been most typically an embedded processor, most people don't write software for it unless it is specialized. And pretty much any game that runs on an iPhone could run on an ARM desktop. Off the top of my head, popular "mainstream" games that I can think of would be Street Fighter 4, Mirror's Edge, I'm sure there are more, I just happen to have those 2 installed on my iPhone. ARM machines can also run Android, as long as you are willing to put in the kernel work, and most companies do these days. The EfikaMX has a "desktop" version as well as a netbook version. They are both almost identical, although the netbook version doesn't have any video out. It also runs off of a 3 cell battery, and gets somewhere in the range of 6-8 hours of solid usage, not just sitting there almost suspended. They(i.MX515) pack the AMD(ATI)z430 3D unit, which runs at 133MHz (the i.MX535 version will run at 200MHz); This is also known as a Qualcomm Adreno, although the Adreno uses a z180 instead of z160 for the 2D unit, not sure if it uses something other than the z430 for 3D. The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz. I'm not sure what graphics card will come with the ARM11, but if it does 1080p and OpenGL ES 2.0, then I'd guess that it's a Mali. I could definitely be wrong, but really, at 25 dollars, even if you only played with it every once in a while, it's probably worth it. And if they do a buy one give one like OLPC did, I'd definitely order a minimum of 4. I hope they are able to, and I'll be watching closely.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz. There is much more to a GPU than simply clock speed. Since modern GPUs do everything with programmable shader units, the number of units acting in parallel makes a big difference, as well as the efficiency of the units (cycles per instruction). Many mobile GPUs' shader units can be counted on one hand[1], while a modern AMD or nVidia GPU has hundreds (though the different architectures make a direct comparison of numbers almost meaningless). [1] I had a hard time finding exact specs last time I looked, but I seem to remember reading about one popular SoC whose GPU had in the neighborhood of 4 pixel shader units.

angusgr 15y ago

There are probably other things incorrect in your comment but the main point I want to address is the "equivalent to a pentium 3"; this is definitely not the case. Just because it is a dual core running at 1ghz doesn't mean it's slow I meant the analogy the other way. That the USB stick computer is the Pentium 3 equivalent and the Trimslice is "four generations along the line", something like the Core 2 Duo. Believe me, I'm extremely excited about the performance/costs power nexus of these new ARM cores. :). And well jealous of your Cortex-A8 build farm. (I did get at least one thing wrong in my reply, which is I somehow thought the USB stick computer was ARM9 not ARM11. So it's only 3 generations of ARM before the Cortex A-9, and that's disregarding all the other lesser-used ARM cores that came between.) PS Please don't make sweeping statements like There are probably other things incorrect in your comment, that's just plain rude.

steevdave 15y ago

It won't let me respond to your comment, and you're right, I shouldn't have made that comment. I do apologize, and apparently misread the comment. Hopefully people can look past both things and realize that there is more to ARM than just "omg the processor isn't as fast as a quad core i7"; That said, I'm also looking forward to this board and hope it makes it stateside. I love ARM (if you couldn't tell), and the main thing holding it back is the lack of people who are familiar with it. Since it's been most typically an embedded processor, most people don't write software for it unless it is specialized. And pretty much any game that runs on an iPhone could run on an ARM desktop. Off the top of my head, popular "mainstream" games that I can think of would be Street Fighter 4, Mirror's Edge, I'm sure there are more, I just happen to have those 2 installed on my iPhone. ARM machines can also run Android, as long as you are willing to put in the kernel work, and most companies do these days. The EfikaMX has a "desktop" version as well as a netbook version. They are both almost identical, although the netbook version doesn't have any video out. It also runs off of a 3 cell battery, and gets somewhere in the range of 6-8 hours of solid usage, not just sitting there almost suspended. They(i.MX515) pack the AMD(ATI)z430 3D unit, which runs at 133MHz (the i.MX535 version will run at 200MHz); This is also known as a Qualcomm Adreno, although the Adreno uses a z180 instead of z160 for the 2D unit, not sure if it uses something other than the z430 for 3D. The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz. I'm not sure what graphics card will come with the ARM11, but if it does 1080p and OpenGL ES 2.0, then I'd guess that it's a Mali. I could definitely be wrong, but really, at 25 dollars, even if you only played with it every once in a while, it's probably worth it. And if they do a buy one give one like OLPC did, I'd definitely order a minimum of 4. I hope they are able to, and I'll be watching closely.

nitrogen 15y ago
The difference between the graphics card in the Xbox360, and these is that the 360's runs at (i believe) 600MHz. There is much more to a GPU than simply clock speed. Since modern GPUs do everything with programmable shader units, the number of units acting in parallel makes a big difference, as well as the efficiency of the units (cycles per instruction). Many mobile GPUs' shader units can be counted on one hand[1], while a modern AMD or nVidia GPU has hundreds (though the different architectures make a direct comparison of numbers almost meaningless). [1] I had a hard time finding exact specs last time I looked, but I seem to remember reading about one popular SoC whose GPU had in the neighborhood of 4 pixel shader units.