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This is mega-brilliant - check it out....it speaks for itself.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/ (http://www.raspberrypi.org/)

i pre-ordered mine in February, i should have it in July.
(yup, huge huge huge success)

The computational throughput per watt is probably okay, perhaps even performance per buck. But absolute performance is not particularly good compared to boring ordinary hardware. Remember the old trick question: "do you want to plow a field with two strong oxen or with 1024 chickens?"

I was thinking of performance per buck - at £30 each buy 100 and with decent networking software (for appropriate tasks) it'll almost certainly outperform any single desktop costing £3000 (at least at UK prices) on either GPU or CPU.

I don't the the performance per buck is superior compared to a good i7. Take the 700Mhz ARM7 of the 30 RasPis to give 21 GHz of ARM7 instructions. An i7 gives you 3Ghz+ by 4 cores, 12 Ghz of i7 instructions, but the i7 has a far superior SIMD engine capable of multiple (4?) 64bit arithmetic per instruction whearas the SIMD of the ARM1176JZFS can do (4?) 16 bit multiplications. So thats a fourfold speed advantage for arithmetic to the i7. 12Ghz x4 = 48Ghz plus there's the multi-threading giving maybe another 20%-30% so maybe 60 billion arithmetic ops for the i7 compared to 21 billion for the 30 ARM7s of the RasbPis.

it's the SOC of the iphone3, it have opengl capability and can run quake3 smoothly (will it run fragmentarium ?  ;D ).
Thingy like the RaspberryPi existed before (and still exist), but priced at $300 or more :)