[Arm-netbook] NuSmartTM 2816

[Gordan Bobic]

On 01/17/2012 05:40 PM, Bari Ari wrote:
> On 01/17/2012 11:30 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>> On a conceptually related note, my Compulab SBC-A510 boards arrived.
>> Once I have them working I'm going to try to find one of those
>> mini-PCIe Volari cards and see how well they work. For possible future
>> relevance - what SoCs are available that don't have a GPU at all? Off
>> the top of my head I can only think of Marvell Kirkwood, but there
>> must be more. Perhaps it might be worthwhile investigating GPU-less
>> SoCs that have either PCIe (for Volari) or USB (for MIMO if that has
>> open specs - but being USB, MIMO should be pretty easy to reverse
>> engineer the spec for).
>
> What is the power consumption of the Kirkwood + Volari?

Quite a lot. SheevaPlug draws 7W from the wall plug at full tilt and 5W 
idle (the power management is virtually non-existant, no 
voltage/frequency scaling). So with a 2W Volari you are probably looking 
at about 9W (including the AC-DC PSU inefficiency.

Remember that Kirkwood is quite ancient. But 7W for a small server is 
perfectly acceptable, passively coolable, and all the specs are open and 
all the feature supported in the mainline kernel. It may not be laptop 
material, but it is great for servers.

> Kirwood or other ARM SOC with PCIe could be matched with an ATI GPU. I
> looked at this 2+ years ago. Use a low core speed and only as few stream
> processors as you want to meet your max power consumption.

Hmm... You really think you can keep that to under 5W?

Gordan