On Thu, 18 May 2017 22:02:03 -0400
Neil Jansen <njansen1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
> <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> wrote:
<snip>
> > a couple of things i forgot to mention, one is to emphasise the
> > "bang-per-buck" part. [...]
> > this kind of design assessment trick i've only ever heard being used
> > by people who make beowulf clusters, the word "cluster" being the key
> > word.
>
> Those are fun problems to solve. You're right that there are a lot of
> variables, and many different approaches. And if you've got a few
> important criteria like cost or time, it's easy enough to weed out the
> bad ones.
>
> Speaking of Beowulf clusters .. Not to go too far off topic, but has
> anyone given any thought to a Beowulf cluster of EOMA68's? I only ask
> because if Intel and AMD are including so much proprietary crap between
> you and the processor, it's only a matter of time before other
> alternatives become important. The way I see it, the current Allwinner
> based EOMA68's are great for doing what a tablet or netbook can do, but
> it's not going to replace my workstation with 16GB of RAM (which I run
> out of probably weekly before needing to restart, but that's another
> story .. Windows and Chrome, I have no one to blame but myself there).
> Anyway, assuming that the Linux kernel could scale to maybe 8-16 of
> these little cores, and being that they're all upgradeable, it actually
> seems like it could become a neat alternative for workstation usage. I
> don't even see where cost would be that prohibitive, as workstations
> actually get pretty expensive often surpassing $1000 USD. Are there
> any hard realities that would prevent the EOMA68 from working in this
> fashion? Any bandwidth issues or technical limitations?
<snip>
I was just researching browser memory usage for myself.
The best one is opera, which is rather shocking (chromium does not open
all the files, this seems to be due to an internal load limiter or
timeout.):
482 local html pages with JS disabled:
Opera 12
1024MiB
Chromium
~2000MiB
The story gets worse with FF, way worse (and the time it takes FF to
render, OMG!)
David