With the demand for portable and smaller devices a low power alternative to the standard Intel Pentium processor will excell. It makes perfect sense for notebook vendors and anyone trying to squeeze weight and size and extend battery life that the less power you need and the less cooling required the lighter and longer running your product will be.
I am anxious to see some good performance benchmarks. I want some good real world software tests of the Crusoe in comparison with the AMD and Intel processors.
These cards are not new, but the idea of embeding Linux on a PowerPC MP system in a PC or Mac would be cool. All this needs is a dedicated 10/100 Enet port and away it goes as a high powered server for web or network gaming. The only problem is that it will be tied to the base system for power, configuration and control. Hence when the main system hangs and needs rebooting, this card gets rebooted/reloaded. I would hate to see Windoze on the base system. This card would be rebooted every hour or so. But, it we were to take a passive backplane and stick a ton of these in there, with a few SCSI RAID controllers and more than a few disks you could have yourself a nice compact cluster of high performance nodes to run Linux on.
This sort of electronics is ideal for embeded web servers in hardware like printers, routers, and even household devices like dishwashers and refridgerators. They are mainly used to present status and alow for minimal device configuration. I like the idea, and do not know why these aren't used more in computer hardware. Heck, I would prefer http'ing to my printer or router to configure them rather than having to change dip switches or attach an async terminal. Heck, why not present status of the internals of servers via this route? The PIC controller could query status, and present it back to the user easily. Get the processor temperatures, the status of the fans, and even generate a hard reset remotely if necessary. Just a thought!
I have a feeling this will become a trend as MP3 and digital music becomes more mainstream. I just hope I wont need to put a cow-motif stereo component from Gateway on my stereo rack!
If you that all the packaging that goes into their software is bad, imagine the warehouses of paper that will be generated due to their legal battles with the government. -Woody
I have worked with compact flash designs for years, and CF II is nothing more than a slightly thicker version of the standard CF card everyone is familiar with (sometimes refered to as CF I). Also, the CF interface is very similar if not almost identical to ATA, hence it is very easy to tie these devices into an ATA/IDE controller. As for a replacement for everyones computer, don't forget that these devices often do not have the same amount of RAM buffering found on traditional hard disks, and that performance often takes a back seat to overall size. Power drain will also be greater due to its mechanical nature. But all said, it would still be cool to use one of these in a PDA/camera.
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With the demand for portable and smaller devices a low power alternative to the standard Intel Pentium processor will excell. It makes perfect sense for notebook vendors and anyone trying to squeeze weight and size and extend battery life that the less power you need and the less cooling required the lighter and longer running your product will be.
I am anxious to see some good performance benchmarks. I want some good real world software tests of the Crusoe in comparison with the AMD and Intel processors.
These cards are not new, but the idea of embeding Linux on a PowerPC MP system in a PC or Mac would be cool. All this needs is a dedicated 10/100 Enet port and away it goes as a high powered server for web or network gaming. The only problem is that it will be tied to the base system for power, configuration and control. Hence when the main system hangs and needs rebooting, this card gets rebooted/reloaded. I would hate to see Windoze on the base system. This card would be rebooted every hour or so. But, it we were to take a passive backplane and stick a ton of these in there, with a few SCSI RAID controllers and more than a few disks you could have yourself a nice compact cluster of high performance nodes to run Linux on.
This sort of electronics is ideal for embeded web servers in hardware like printers, routers, and even household devices like dishwashers and refridgerators. They are mainly used to present status and alow for minimal device configuration. I like the idea, and do not know why these aren't used more in computer hardware. Heck, I would prefer http'ing to my printer or router to configure them rather than having to change dip switches or attach an async terminal. Heck, why not present status of the internals of servers via this route? The PIC controller could query status, and present it back to the user easily. Get the processor temperatures, the status of the fans, and even generate a hard reset remotely if necessary. Just a thought!
I have a feeling this will become a trend as MP3 and digital music becomes more mainstream. I just hope I wont need to put a cow-motif stereo component from Gateway on my stereo rack!
-Woody
If you that all the packaging that goes into their software is bad, imagine the warehouses of paper that will be generated due to their legal battles with the government. -Woody
I have worked with compact flash designs for years, and CF II is nothing more than a slightly thicker version of the standard CF card everyone is familiar with (sometimes refered to as CF I). Also, the CF interface is very similar if not almost identical to ATA, hence it is very easy to tie these devices into an ATA/IDE controller.
As for a replacement for everyones computer, don't forget that these devices often do not have the same amount of RAM buffering found on traditional hard disks, and that performance often takes a back seat to overall size. Power drain will also be greater due to its mechanical nature. But all said, it would still be cool to use one of these in a PDA/camera.