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

[Gordan Bobic]

On 05/05/2012 23:08, moo cow wrote:
> hi,
> the kirkwood doesnt have hardware FPU from recollection ?  as i
> understand it debian is starting now to take more advantage of hard float ?

Yes, Kirkwood is armv5tel. FPU is optional on < ARMv5 and ARMv6. I think 
Debian are intending to support armv5tel, but IIRC Ubuntu will only be 
available for armv7hl in the future. Fedora, OTOH, is going to be 
supporting armv5tel for the foreseeable future.

I honestly don't think the lack of FPU is an issue for most things.

>   ... subjectively @ circa 1GHZ  kirkwood is  supposedly around the same
> performance on real world non GPU apps as the raspi ...

Sounds about right. I would expect a SheevaPlug would outperform the 
raspi in typical server uses.

> the A10
> particularly clocked towards  1.5GHZ and with decent drivers should be a
> big step up ?

I thought the A10 is only rated up to 1GHz, and the 1.5GHz is the 
misadvertising adding 500MHz from the GPU or something?

> .. 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 :-)

Yeah, redsleeve.org is running on a DreamPlug (1.2GHz Kirkwood, 
virtually identical to SheevaPlug/GuruPlug). It has SATA, and with an 
Intel X25-V, the performance is pretty good. And once I manage to get 
tbb to build on ARM, it'll be even better because then I'll be able to 
get all the PHP stuff rebuilt with hiphop.

Gordan