ok, just a quick thoughts / status update. we've had it confirmed that the CPU is external 2gb addressing but *internal* limited to 1gb (!)
little factory is still going over the BOM, but want to put in 512mb DDR RAM ICs because they're cheaper. they were planning to make room for up to 4gb NAND flash *but*... something just occurred to me / my associates: thailand's under water. the implications of that are that the factories which used to make low-end IDE drives and pretty much every SATA drive under 80gb no longer exist... and probably won't ever be rebuilt. everyone's moving to SSDs for low-end, and the prices for larger HDDs are rapidly escalating. now, for free software developers we don't give a rat's arse: there's always room to cut down to emdebian, or use cramfs, or... whatever: there's always creative ways to make a bit more room, but i've been connecting the dots a bit from various peoples' input, talked it over with my associates and we came up with an idea. alain (williams) asked a very pertinent question, he said, "ok yep count me in, but how do i make any money from this?" and it put me on the spot and i went, "um, well... how about you do servers but use these as low-power ones" and then i realised of course, he's a CentOS maintainer, hosts some packages, so he's going to try CentOS for ARM and then well if that works, he'll be the maintainer of the ARM port of CentOS servers. then we put two and two together and went, "hang on, these are effectively blades, why not have a chassis like the ZT-Systems one, with a gigabit backbone, space for SATA drives, and up to 8 EOMA-PCMCIA-compliant CPU cards, each with 1gb DDR3 RAM and these Cortex A8s?" it'll all be low-cost, you can get 40gb to 80gb SATA drives, turn it into a big software RAID or NAS box or a high-performance (but higher-than-average latency of course) load-balanced server aka cloud jobbie. at which point i went "oh shit - low-end SATA drives don't bloody *exist* any more!" :) [look on ebuyer's site for SATA drives below £50 - there aren't any]. so _then_ i thought, hang on, NAND flash ICs in SSDs are like, dropping like a stone as they pick up the slack from the fact that low-end SATA and IDE drives don't exist, hmm, and the spec on the allwinner CPU says that it has 8 NAND chip-select lines... why not ask the little factory in shenzen if they can make room (on the other side of the PCMCIA card) for another 7 4gb NAND flash ICs? so if you wanted a "cheap" low-cost version, it'd be 512mb RAM with maybe a single 1gb NAND flash IC; the next version up would be 1gb RAM with a single 4gb NAND flash IC (again, single-sided so it's a cheaper build cost); the insane version would be effectively its own SSD with up to 32gb NAND flash, potentially 8x the speed of the 4gb version, and people could do their own wear-levelling (i hope!), i remember how everyone keeps bitching about how these bloody SSDs always get in the way with the stupid, stupid assumption that there's going to be a FAT or NTFS partition on it. then, if you shoved 8 of those into a single rack you wouldn't _need_ SSDs or SATA drives unless you wanted a multi-terabyte server with 8gb of RAM and 12ghz of raw Cortex A8 CPU horsepower (oh, and if f***** ARM pulled their bloody finger out over the intransigent position regarding MALI 400MP open source licensing, you'd get god knows how much raw GPU power as well, all in well under what... 25 to 35 watts?) i think i've got a 35 watt laptop PSU somewhere that might run that lot, somewhere... oh yes, it's my (broken) dell laptop with its "Ultra Low Voltage" 1.2ghz Dual-Core CPU, mmm.... ok. bit longer than i anticipated, but i do love a good story. sorry. bottom line: anyone grok the above, would want to sell these "promised" ARM-based servers we keep hearing about, but like, y'know, actual real ones, please do speak up, and i'll see how to arrange it. bear in mind that, thanks to the EOMA-PCMCIA specification, it will be possible to swap out the CPU cards with anything else that comes along in the future which also has 10/100 ethernet and SATA-II (possibly a Cortex A9 which would then have virtualisation - A8s *don't* have virtualisation), but no, you can't have 10/100/1000 or SATA-III this really _is_ at the "low-cost" and "low-power" end, going a bit on the odd side perhaps, pushing that "low-power equals a bit higher latency" thing a bit further along than is usually expected, but i believe the concept has merit. but... what's more important than what _i_ think has merit is what _you_ think has merit :) l. p.s. if you're thinking that thailand's going to get its factories back any time soon, you have to bear in mind that it's not the typhoid or the trenchfoot that's going to kill the most people, it'll be the deadly poisonous snakes that were flushed out and will now be living where all the humans want to be, once the water subsides. whoops... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". 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