[Arm-netbook] R-Pi Only Better and More Available?

[Gordan Bobic]

On 05/22/2012 05:57 PM, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> It will be interesting to see a more PC take on ARM systems.

Tell me about it. The only *TX form factor ARM boards I have seen are an 
ancient Simtec one (<= 128MB of RAM, 266MHz ARMv5), Compulab SBC-A510 
(eyewateringly expensive for what is the exact same hardware as a CuBox 
but on an uATX board), and this new Via based board.

Now if we can just get more ARMs with 64-bits wide memory bus so that 
these boards end up with DIMM slots, it'll be awesome. Or failing that, 
at least boards with the maximum RAM the SoC can handle (provided it is 
at least 2GB) would be a good start.

> I really think there is a missed opportunity here without miniPCIe or
> SATA. But if this does well we might see more feature rich boards in the
> future.

It is possible that the Via SoC in question doesn't have SATA and PCI. 
But the lack of SATA isn't that big a deal. Disk I/O is more about IOPS 
than about MB/s - I get about 2000 IOPS out of a SuperTalent RC8 in my 
Toshiba AC100 (bottlenecked by USB 2, the RC8 is USB 3 capable) and the 
performance is pretty amazing:

http://www.altechnative.net/2012/02/07/morebetter-internal-storage-on-the-toshiba-ac100-part-2/

Sure, a decent SATA SSD will probably beat it, but I would be surprised 
if you could actually feel the difference on an ARM machine of this 
performance. My 1.4GHz Tegra2 certaonly ends up CPU rather than disk I/O 
bound with the RC8.

Gordan