[Arm-netbook] Selecting the right Soc for out ARM Notebook project.

[David Given]

On 05/05/12 23:08, moo cow wrote:
[...]
> the kirkwood doesnt have hardware FPU from recollection ?  as i
> understand it debian is starting now to take more advantage of hard float ?

Yup, the Kirkwood has no hard float. It is, I am told, based on the old
Intel StrongARM architecture, which is why it's relatively power hungry.
It also apparently gets less work done per clock cycle than modern ARM
architectures.

Debian (and Ubuntu) have just introduced a new architecture, armhf,
which properly makes use of the hardware floating point unit on modern
ARM architectures (ARMv7 and above). The A10 is ARMv7 so we can use armhf.

What core implementation is the A10 based around?

[...]
> .. my hacked debian kirkwood iconnect and usb HD  is still after a
> couple of years working away 24/7 doing its VPN, squeezebox server,
> minidlna, bbc iplayer duties and more .. though its lack of performance
> is getting noticable and its looking for its replacement .. but for a
> tenner on ebay its a star :-)  

I run cowlark.com off a SheevaPlug with a couple of hard drives plugged
in to it. That does firewall, router, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, NNTP, voicemail,
backup duties, and a few other things (including running Java
servlets!), and handles it all very nicely. Total power consumption
including the ADSL router, wifi access point and UPS, is about 15W. But
it's not quite reliable, and it's a bit sluggish, and HDD access over
USB is dead slow; I'm looking to replace it with the A1000.

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
│
│ "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
│ stupidity." --- Nick Diamos (Hanlon's Razor)

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