A new target device for Linux fractal software.....

[David Makin]

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

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

[ker2x]

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

[hobold]

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?"

[David Makin]

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.

[panzerboy]

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.

[ker2x]

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