"Despite the faster chip, the batteries on the OQO run about 9.5 hours, Ditzel and Hunter said. Although the Crusoe processor runs on fairly low amounts of energy, the small screen size helps enormously."
Power consumption of a 4" LCD CCFL is around 1W, which is the same for any 4" - 15" single lamp LCD panel. The small screen size does not help any with the reduction of power consumtion. Power consumtion for this device will about the same as any Crusoe powered laptop since memory and the hard drive will still draw the same amount of power. This unit will only see a 9.5 hour battery life if the CCFL is off and the hardrive is powered down with the processor running at under 20% with not many accesses to memory.
DiVX is a very close variant of MPEG-4 and no longer has its source open. H.26L is open and already provides for 1.5 x better compression than DiVX. XViD is also about 10% faster and is open source and nearly all GPL at this point.
DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature.
The bout between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft with their video game consoles could become even more heated when Linux enters the fray this spring. Sony will sell online the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" Release 1.0 in the U.S. in May 2002. (A European version will come out that month, too, and the Japanese version earlier in April.)
<script></script> This kit will include a Linux distribution on DVD that runs on the PS2 hardware, additional software, documentation, a 40GB hard drive, an Ethernet adapter, a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, and a computer monitor cable. The package will cost $200. (The PlayStation 2 is sold separately, though.)
While Linux has been brought to other consoles (such as the SEGA Dreamcast) by hobbyist programmers in the Linux community, this is the first distribution officially released, sold, and supported by a major hardware manufacturer for its game console. Since the demonstration of the kit in January this year at LinuxWorld, over four thousand people have registered at the Linux for PlayStation 2 Community Web site. The site offers discussion forums and file space to help Linux PS2 developers coordinate with one another on projects.
Besides the sheer geek thrill of being able to do it, there's a practical reason for running Linux on a PlayStation 2. A lot of people expressing interest in this kit are hobbyists looking to gain experience in developing for a major game console. The Linux PS2 distribution makes home-brew game programming and experimentation on the PS2 platform affordable for such individuals. The only other alternative is to become a professional, licensed developer and lease a PS2 development kit from Sony--and the professional license and development kit cost many thousands of dollars.
[Items in the Release 1.0 kit.] The items that come with the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" Release 1.0 kit. (Almost) Full access to the PS2's capabilities
The PlayStation 2-specific libraries will be released under the LGPL; there are no proprietary licenses involved. Sony's distribution of Linux is based on Kondara Linux, which in turn is based on Red Hat Linux. The documentation with this kit will give all the same information about the PS2 hardware that Sony provides its licensed game developers (but it won't give access to the system's anti-piracy mechanisms). This will include full details on the PS2's proprietary Emotion Engine core instruction set, the Graphic Synthesizer, and the Vector Processing Units. "The idea was to simply provide a functional and complete distribution of Linux on the PlayStation 2, while also giving access to the PlayStation 2's unique hardware," says Sarah Ewen, who works for Sony as one of its Linux engineers responsible for supporting the kit.
Related Reading [Physics for Game Developers]
Physics for Game Developers By David M. Bourg Table of Contents Index Author's Article Sample Chapter
Those interested in buying and playing around with the PS2 Linux kit should be aware of some things before getting it: Access to the PS2's DVD drive is restricted so that only official PlayStation discs can be read; and CD-Rs and DVD-R discs won't work in the drive. However, the USB ports on the PS2 are standard, so some USB external CD and DVD drive models that are supported under Linux could be used with this kit.
In terms of programming, the following graphics libraries are provided: libSDL (a fast, 2D graphics library), mesa, and ps2gl (a simplified GL clone, which makes use of the PlayStation 2's hardware). Ewen says, with these tools and enough effort on a programmer's part, it is possible to create games with graphics that are comparable to those of commercial PS2 games: "So the limitations really are few. You have almost unfettered access to the [graphics] hardware. There is nothing stopping programmers from coding 'right to the metal' using the Linux kit."
As for the portability of code from Linux on a PC system to the PS2, most applications written on a PC will compile on the PlayStation 2 with little or no modification. The significant difference is having to pass the --host option to the configure script. The kit supports languages typical to a Linux distribution, like C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. The only one missing is Java, although Kaffe has been ported by others in the Linux PS2 community.
"Porting between Linux on the PC and Linux on the PS2 is very easy. Both the PC and PS2 use the same endianness, the same word sizes, et cetera," says Sam Lantinga, a software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment (makers of the Diablo and Warcraft game franchises). With the kit, he ported to the PS2 his Simple DirectMedia Layer, a cross-platform library he created for handling access to graphics and sound, that is mainly used for helping to develop Linux games. "The only kind of code that I can think of that wouldn't run on the PS2, if it ran on a PC, would be either very memory-intensive applications or applications like WINE that require an x86 CPU core."
[Screen shot...click for full-size view.] X Windows running on the PlayStation 2 with the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" kit. (Click for full-size view.) Open source, open possibilities over the competition?
For Sony, there is no plan to make this kit a significant revenue source. The company won't be advertising it through the usual methods since it doesn't want to confuse consumers who have no interest in Linux or programming. "We're definitely not trying to enter the desktop PC market [with the Linux PS2 kit]," says Ewen, who points out that Sony already sells its own brand of PCs.
Regardless, there could be benefits for the company if the PS2 is seen as more than just a game console. Lantinga predicts that this kit, with its inclusion of an Ethernet adapter and hard drive, could spur the development of online applications and services, things that could give the PS2 platform an edge over Microsoft's Xbox. "Linux is the natural choice for Sony to leverage the vast amount of non-Microsoft expertise available around the world," says Lantinga.
Then there's the advantage for Sony that more games will inevitably appear for the PS2, thanks to this kit. Lantinga easily ported Maelstrom to the PlayStation 2 and played it with the console's game controllers on a television set. "That was very cool. Any other 2D game [made with Simple DirectMedia Layer] that uses 640x480 or lower video resolution should run just fine on the PS2," he says. "So I expect that when the Linux kit ships in the U.S., there will be a number of games almost immediately available for it. It should be fun."
Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network, and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com and Wired, among others.
This is a great material for cooling supercomputers and ultra-dense servers that would otherwise require more elaborate elaborate liquid cooling systems.
The handheld and laptop market is another area that could really use this to keep the cpu and graphics processor cool.
This sounds like it takes highly thermally conductive polymers like CoolPoly to another level. .
Two recently published polls show that support for a national ID card has decreased. Results from a poll on the February 27 Washington Post Federal Page showed that public opinion was divided on the issue, with 47% of Americans thinking that national ID will improve interaction with government and business and 44% viewing it as "an invasion of people's civil liberties and privacy." A new survey released on March 12 by Gartner Inc. found that 26 percent of Americans are in favor of a national ID card, while 41 percent oppose the idea. See Wired News: Support for ID Cards Waning
Your Paypal account can be frozen at any time, without advance notice leaving you without your money for weeks (if not forever), and there isn't much you can do about it.
You won't find a single Cluster running Window$ in the TOP500 http://www.top500.org
Try submitting this question to beowulf@beowulf.org or to the LinuxBIOS group linuxbios@lanl.gov
You'll get some pretty thorough responses from actual cluster builders and users as to why nobody bothers with Window$ in clustering for performance computations.
Toshiba spun off ArTile Microsystems for the TX7901 mips cpu with a 128-bit internal architecture, dual-issue superscalar pipeline CPU, but it has taken years.
http://www.artilemicro.com/html/products.html
Don't expect to see a TX99 till at least 04 at this rate and by then it will be behind the times just like the TX79.
Snicker about playing games at work, but the low cost, appropriate features, and availability of Gameboy resources might change your mind about using it as a nongaming, handheld terminal.
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout= ar ticle&articleid=CA193186&pubdate=2-7-02
Reverse-engineering One of the challenges of success is that other people will attempt to reverse-engineer your design for their own ends, despite your efforts to the contrary. Although an emulator is a powerful development tool and the ability to make safeguard copies of programs you have purchased is legitimate, the availability of these two capabilities have meant potential loss of revenue for Nintendo because people can avoid buying a Gameboy and cartridges to play games. Nintendo has successfully shut down some companies that sold products that have little apparent value except to permit someone to access, copy, and play games without purchasing a proper license. The Gameboy Advanced has the ability to copy a program from one device to another without using a cartridge in the other Gameboy Advanced, and that fact may explain the reluctance to share the game-link-interface specifications. The Gameboy Color, which this project used, does not support this capability, but, as projects on the Web show, a little information can result in many unintended uses of a narrowly defined product (References A, B, C, and D).
Not all reverse-engineering efforts have negative results for a company. Lego Mindstorms, which incorporates microprocessors, sensors, and motors into Lego bricks may have actually benefited from reverse-engineering activities (Reference E). Engineers, researchers, and hobbyists reverse-engineered the firmware, created new programming tools, and developed unintended ways of connecting the systems to the world. Rather than pursuing legal action to squelch this activity, the company has made available internal documentation for its firmware, sponsored conferences discussing theory and applications, and includes links to independent development tools on its own Web pages. Don't expect this kind of support if you try to produce blocks that interlock with Legos.
References A. Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced Development Web Rings, http://d.webring.com/hub?ring=gameboydev and http://c.webring.com/hub?ring=thegameboyadvanc.
B. Gatesboy, www.gatesboy.com.
C. Frohwein, Jeff, Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced, www.devrs.com.
D. Ziegler, Reiner, Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced, www.reinerziegler.de.
E. Wallich, Paul "Mindstorms: not just a kid's toy," IEEE Spectrum, September 2001, Volume 38, No. 9, www.spectrum.ieee.org/pubs/spectrum/0901/mind.html.
"Do a search at google groups: http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announc ement.html
search for all_xp_suite_keygen.zip
You'll find 2 hits. There's a link in the first hit to a site hosting this file. "
"Where current cable modem users share a data pipe that can carry about 30 megabits-per-second, Rainmaker customers will get 170 megabits-per-second or more. With wavelet modulation filling the entire one gigahertz capacity of coaxial cable at 10 bits-per-hertz, the ultimate capacity of the system is 10 gigabits-per-second for each segmented subnet. That's enough room for 500 HDTV channels on the same cable that's connected to your house right now."
10 bits/hertz isn't too shabby a start for some "real parts" you can drop into a system and be off and running. VMSK/2 however can achieve over 90 Bits/Hertz today. Combine this with fractal based data compression and you could achieve over an order of magnitude higher bandwidth compression!
This would give customers over 1.5Gbits/sec with just using VMSK/2 over their existing cable with an ultimate system capacity of over 90Gbits/sec or 4500 HDTV channels. VMSK/2 is very achievable over cable since you can crank up the power levels enough to provide for an effective signal to noise ratio.
Debian already runs on the SH4. The SH7751V they seem to have chosen has a 0.9GFLOP FPU so it's capable of pretty decent Divx encodes and decodes. This unit could make for a pretty decent portable DVR.
SYSTEM CAPABILITY: The 3,000 processors can perform up to 6 teraflops,
or 6 trillion calculations per second. Virtually every man, woman and child
on earth would have to perform a calculation each second to keep pace.
Unless the population of the Earth has increased by 1,000 times recently, every person would have to perform a calculation every 1ms to keep pace.
If size is more of a concern than cost then a single board computer (SBC) is your best bet. PC/104 is ISA only so you don't find any lightning fast cpu's or graphics processors on them. PC/104-Plus will get you PCI at least. There are a few very small 3" x 5" SBC's that feature 1GHz Athalons along with AGP 3-D graphics accelerators, high performance chipsets like the SiS 630 and all the usual I/O's and drive controllers. Some vendors offer very compact enclosures for them as well.
We've been doing some very dense "how about a beocluster of those" kinds of designs lately and 2 cpu per 1U is pretty much off the shelf. 16 cpu's per 1U has been working quite well. You just have to get away from any cooling techniques based on air convection like most 1U servers use and start thinking conduction cooling to get the heat out of the small enclosure. Look for 8 Crusoe Processor per 1U servers poping up from a few vendors later on this summer. The new Intel Very Low Voltage P-III's also look good for this along with SMP chipsets.
Very fast boot times isn't the only great feature of LinuxBIOS. LinuxBIOS can boot Linux and other OS's like Be or QNX, though it's not for Dos or Windows since they rely heavily on the legacy BIOS for certain features of operation that LinuxBIOS doesn't bother with. LinuxBIOS has a very stripped down linux kernel that just sets up some basic features of a PC better than many OEM BIOSes (memory, cache, super I/O) and then jumps to loading whatever kernel you wish to take the system from there.
Wouldn't it be nice if a patent was awarded for the Blue Screen of Death outside of M$. This would either force M$ into bankruptcy in order to pay for all the royalties or to produce stable code. It's a WIN-WIN situation either way!
Slashdot Mirror
"Despite the faster chip, the batteries on the OQO run about 9.5 hours, Ditzel and Hunter said. Although the Crusoe processor runs on fairly low amounts of energy, the small screen size helps enormously."
Power consumption of a 4" LCD CCFL is around 1W, which is the same for any 4" - 15" single lamp LCD panel. The small screen size does not help any with the reduction of power consumtion. Power consumtion for this device will about the same as any Crusoe powered laptop since memory and the hard drive will still draw the same amount of power. This unit will only see a 9.5 hour battery life if the CCFL is off and the hardrive is powered down with the processor running at under 20% with not many accesses to memory.
DiVX is a very close variant of MPEG-4 and no longer has its source open. H.26L is open and already provides for 1.5 x better compression than DiVX. XViD is also about 10% faster and is open source and nearly all GPL at this point.
DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature.
This is the entire article posted here, since it was already
The bout between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft with their video game consoles could become even more heated when Linux enters the fray this spring. Sony will sell online the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" Release 1.0 in the U.S. in May 2002. (A European version will come out that month, too, and the Japanese version earlier in April.)
<script></script>
This kit will include a Linux distribution on DVD that runs on the PS2 hardware, additional software, documentation, a 40GB hard drive, an Ethernet adapter, a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, and a computer monitor cable. The package will cost $200. (The PlayStation 2 is sold separately, though.)
While Linux has been brought to other consoles (such as the SEGA Dreamcast) by hobbyist programmers in the Linux community, this is the first distribution officially released, sold, and supported by a major hardware manufacturer for its game console. Since the demonstration of the kit in January this year at LinuxWorld, over four thousand people have registered at the Linux for PlayStation 2 Community Web site. The site offers discussion forums and file space to help Linux PS2 developers coordinate with one another on projects.
Besides the sheer geek thrill of being able to do it, there's a practical reason for running Linux on a PlayStation 2. A lot of people expressing interest in this kit are hobbyists looking to gain experience in developing for a major game console. The Linux PS2 distribution makes home-brew game programming and experimentation on the PS2 platform affordable for such individuals. The only other alternative is to become a professional, licensed developer and lease a PS2 development kit from Sony--and the professional license and development kit cost many thousands of dollars.
[Items in the Release 1.0 kit.]
The items that come with the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" Release 1.0 kit.
(Almost) Full access to the PS2's capabilities
The PlayStation 2-specific libraries will be released under the LGPL; there are no proprietary licenses involved. Sony's distribution of Linux is based on Kondara Linux, which in turn is based on Red Hat Linux. The documentation with this kit will give all the same information about the PS2 hardware that Sony provides its licensed game developers (but it won't give access to the system's anti-piracy mechanisms). This will include full details on the PS2's proprietary Emotion Engine core instruction set, the Graphic Synthesizer, and the Vector Processing Units. "The idea was to simply provide a functional and complete distribution of Linux on the PlayStation 2, while also giving access to the PlayStation 2's unique hardware," says Sarah Ewen, who works for Sony as one of its Linux engineers responsible for supporting the kit.
Related Reading
[Physics for Game Developers]
Physics for Game Developers
By David M. Bourg
Table of Contents
Index
Author's Article
Sample Chapter
Those interested in buying and playing around with the PS2 Linux kit should be aware of some things before getting it: Access to the PS2's DVD drive is restricted so that only official PlayStation discs can be read; and CD-Rs and DVD-R discs won't work in the drive. However, the USB ports on the PS2 are standard, so some USB external CD and DVD drive models that are supported under Linux could be used with this kit.
In terms of programming, the following graphics libraries are provided: libSDL (a fast, 2D graphics library), mesa, and ps2gl (a simplified GL clone, which makes use of the PlayStation 2's hardware). Ewen says, with these tools and enough effort on a programmer's part, it is possible to create games with graphics that are comparable to those of commercial PS2 games: "So the limitations really are few. You have almost unfettered access to the [graphics] hardware. There is nothing stopping programmers from coding 'right to the metal' using the Linux kit."
As for the portability of code from Linux on a PC system to the PS2, most applications written on a PC will compile on the PlayStation 2 with little or no modification. The significant difference is having to pass the --host option to the configure script. The kit supports languages typical to a Linux distribution, like C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. The only one missing is Java, although Kaffe has been ported by others in the Linux PS2 community.
"Porting between Linux on the PC and Linux on the PS2 is very easy. Both the PC and PS2 use the same endianness, the same word sizes, et cetera," says Sam Lantinga, a software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment (makers of the Diablo and Warcraft game franchises). With the kit, he ported to the PS2 his Simple DirectMedia Layer, a cross-platform library he created for handling access to graphics and sound, that is mainly used for helping to develop Linux games. "The only kind of code that I can think of that wouldn't run on the PS2, if it ran on a PC, would be either very memory-intensive applications or applications like WINE that require an x86 CPU core."
[Screen shot...click for full-size view.]
X Windows running on the PlayStation 2 with the "Linux (for PlayStation 2)" kit. (Click for full-size view.)
Open source, open possibilities over the competition?
For Sony, there is no plan to make this kit a significant revenue source. The company won't be advertising it through the usual methods since it doesn't want to confuse consumers who have no interest in Linux or programming. "We're definitely not trying to enter the desktop PC market [with the Linux PS2 kit]," says Ewen, who points out that Sony already sells its own brand of PCs.
Regardless, there could be benefits for the company if the PS2 is seen as more than just a game console. Lantinga predicts that this kit, with its inclusion of an Ethernet adapter and hard drive, could spur the development of online applications and services, things that could give the PS2 platform an edge over Microsoft's Xbox. "Linux is the natural choice for Sony to leverage the vast amount of non-Microsoft expertise available around the world," says Lantinga.
Then there's the advantage for Sony that more games will inevitably appear for the PS2, thanks to this kit. Lantinga easily ported Maelstrom to the PlayStation 2 and played it with the console's game controllers on a television set. "That was very cool. Any other 2D game [made with Simple DirectMedia Layer] that uses 640x480 or lower video resolution should run just fine on the PS2," he says. "So I expect that when the Linux kit ships in the U.S., there will be a number of games almost immediately available for it. It should be fun."
Howard Wen is a freelance writer who has contributed frequently to O'Reilly Network, and written for Salon.com, Playboy.com and Wired, among others.
Linux for Playstation 2 Community
Pre-Order Linux for PS-2
This is a great material for cooling supercomputers and ultra-dense servers that would otherwise require more elaborate elaborate liquid cooling systems.
The handheld and laptop market is another area that could really use this to keep the cpu and graphics processor cool.
This sounds like it takes highly thermally conductive polymers like CoolPoly to another level.
.
Two recently published polls show that support for a national ID card has decreased. Results from a poll on the February 27 Washington Post Federal Page showed that public opinion was divided on the issue, with 47% of Americans thinking that national ID will improve interaction with government and business and 44% viewing it as "an invasion of people's civil liberties and privacy." A new survey released on March 12 by Gartner Inc. found that 26 percent of Americans are in favor of a national ID card, while 41 percent oppose the idea.
See Wired News: Support for ID Cards Waning
-
WARNING:
Your Paypal account can be frozen at any time, without advance notice leaving you without your money for weeks (if not forever), and there isn't much you can do about it.
Paypal Warning
More about this story at:
NandoTimes
Looks like this site is now the winner of todays International Obfuscated Website Contest due to the /. effect.
.
Here are a few papers that better describe the rank technology involved:
/ v5 i1p1.html
x tr acting_macrosopic_information_from_web_links.pdf
http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/2001_E
.
Hey look! There was ONE afterall.
You won't find a single Cluster running Window$ in the TOP500 http://www.top500.org
Try submitting this question to beowulf@beowulf.org or to the LinuxBIOS group linuxbios@lanl.gov
You'll get some pretty thorough responses from actual cluster builders and users as to why nobody bothers with Window$ in clustering for performance computations.
.
Toshiba spun off ArTile Microsystems for the TX7901 mips cpu with a 128-bit internal architecture, dual-issue superscalar pipeline CPU, but it has taken years.
http://www.artilemicro.com/html/products.html
Don't expect to see a TX99 till at least 04 at this rate and by then it will be behind the times just like the TX79.
.
Here's the correct link:
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/
.
Gaming as serious business
= ar ticle&articleid=CA193186&pubdate=2-7-02
l .
Snicker about playing games at work, but the low cost, appropriate features, and availability of Gameboy resources might change your mind about using it as a nongaming, handheld terminal.
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout
Reverse-engineering
One of the challenges of success is that other people will attempt to reverse-engineer your design for their own ends, despite your efforts to the contrary. Although an emulator is a powerful development tool and the ability to make safeguard copies of programs you have purchased is legitimate, the availability of these two capabilities have meant potential loss of revenue for Nintendo because people can avoid buying a Gameboy and cartridges to play games. Nintendo has successfully shut down some companies that sold products that have little apparent value except to permit someone to access, copy, and play games without purchasing a proper license. The Gameboy Advanced has the ability to copy a program from one device to another without using a cartridge in the other Gameboy Advanced, and that fact may explain the reluctance to share the game-link-interface specifications. The Gameboy Color, which this project used, does not support this capability, but, as projects on the Web show, a little information can result in many unintended uses of a narrowly defined product (References A, B, C, and D).
Not all reverse-engineering efforts have negative results for a company. Lego Mindstorms, which incorporates microprocessors, sensors, and motors into Lego bricks may have actually benefited from reverse-engineering activities (Reference E). Engineers, researchers, and hobbyists reverse-engineered the firmware, created new programming tools, and developed unintended ways of connecting the systems to the world. Rather than pursuing legal action to squelch this activity, the company has made available internal documentation for its firmware, sponsored conferences discussing theory and applications, and includes links to independent development tools on its own Web pages. Don't expect this kind of support if you try to produce blocks that interlock with Legos.
References
A. Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced Development Web Rings, http://d.webring.com/hub?ring=gameboydev and http://c.webring.com/hub?ring=thegameboyadvanc.
B. Gatesboy, www.gatesboy.com.
C. Frohwein, Jeff, Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced, www.devrs.com.
D. Ziegler, Reiner, Gameboy and Gameboy Advanced, www.reinerziegler.de.
E. Wallich, Paul "Mindstorms: not just a kid's toy," IEEE Spectrum, September 2001, Volume 38, No. 9, www.spectrum.ieee.org/pubs/spectrum/0901/mind.htm
"Do a search at google groups: http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announc ement.html
search for all_xp_suite_keygen.zip
You'll find 2 hits. There's a link in the first hit to a site hosting this file. "
"Where current cable modem users share a data pipe that can carry about 30 megabits-per-second, Rainmaker customers will get 170 megabits-per-second or more. With wavelet modulation filling the entire one gigahertz capacity of coaxial cable at 10 bits-per-hertz, the ultimate capacity of the system is 10 gigabits-per-second for each segmented subnet. That's enough room for 500 HDTV channels on the same cable that's connected to your house right now."
10 bits/hertz isn't too shabby a start for some "real parts" you can drop into a system and be off and running. VMSK/2 however can achieve over 90 Bits/Hertz today. Combine this with fractal based data compression and you could achieve over an order of magnitude higher bandwidth compression!
This would give customers over 1.5Gbits/sec with just using VMSK/2 over their existing cable with an ultimate system capacity of over 90Gbits/sec or 4500 HDTV channels. VMSK/2 is very achievable over cable since you can crank up the power levels enough to provide for an effective signal to noise ratio.
.
Take a look at
d ex .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/in
They posted the results of their showdown 2weeks ago.
Debian already runs on the SH4. The SH7751V they seem to have chosen has a 0.9GFLOP FPU so it's capable of pretty decent Divx encodes and decodes. This unit could make for a pretty decent portable DVR.
SYSTEM CAPABILITY: The 3,000 processors can perform up to 6 teraflops,
or 6 trillion calculations per second. Virtually every man, woman and child
on earth would have to perform a calculation each second to keep pace.
Unless the population of the Earth has increased by 1,000 times recently, every person would have to perform a calculation every 1ms to keep pace.
If size is more of a concern than cost then a single board computer (SBC) is your best bet. PC/104 is ISA only so you don't find any lightning fast cpu's or graphics processors on them. PC/104-Plus will get you PCI at least. There are a few very small 3" x 5" SBC's that feature 1GHz Athalons along with AGP 3-D graphics accelerators, high performance chipsets like the SiS 630 and all the usual I/O's and drive controllers. Some vendors offer very compact enclosures for them as well.
We've been doing some very dense "how about a beocluster of those" kinds of designs lately and 2 cpu per 1U is pretty much off the shelf. 16 cpu's per 1U has been working quite well. You just have to get away from any cooling techniques based on air convection like most 1U servers use and start thinking conduction cooling to get the heat out of the small enclosure. Look for 8 Crusoe Processor per 1U servers poping up from a few vendors later on this summer. The new Intel Very Low Voltage P-III's also look good for this along with SMP chipsets.
Very fast boot times isn't the only great feature of LinuxBIOS. LinuxBIOS can boot Linux and other OS's like Be or QNX, though it's not for Dos or Windows since they rely heavily on the legacy BIOS for certain features of operation that LinuxBIOS doesn't bother with. LinuxBIOS has a very stripped down linux kernel that just sets up some basic features of a PC better than many OEM BIOSes (memory, cache, super I/O) and then jumps to loading whatever kernel you wish to take the system from there.
Wouldn't it be nice if a patent was awarded for the Blue Screen of Death outside of M$. This would either force M$ into bankruptcy in order to pay for all the royalties or to produce stable code. It's a WIN-WIN situation either way!