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Re: [LUG] Small ARM Server/Dev platform

 

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009, Rob Beard wrote:

On 10/12/2009 18:18, Gordon Henderson wrote:

The atom CPU is reltively low-power (wattage), however the rest of the components on the motherboard aren't )-:

Look at that board and you'll see that the chip with the fan on isn't the processor, it's the northbridge/graphics chip.... (And if it's an intel board, the fan will fail after 3 months of 24x7 use - I've had 3 now do this)

I've got several Atom boards - as a workstation and as servers and they're all hotter than Via boards. My home server - Atom single core processor, 1GB of RAM, 2 x 1TB WD "green" drives still sucks 45 watts (the drives are < 10 watts each) If only I could power-down the video hardware on the servers... If only they had a serial accessable BIOS...

That's where the Geode board I use win - no power sucking video hardware! That's also where the sheeva units will win in terms of power consumption too.

Have you had a look at any of the Ion boards available Gordon?

Not recently ...

Just found:

  http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12603

Looks like it's aimed at the set-top/multimedia type of market...

I'm sure I read that the NVidia Ion chipset isn't as power hungry as the Intel chipset making the fan optional. Then there is the new Atom CPUs coming out next year which IIRC have slightly higher power consumption but have integrated graphics and memory controllers which cuts down on the need for as much in the supporting chipset which I believe overall cuts power consumption.

As you say though, the Geode is a great little board.

I'm after getting back to the days when servers were servers and had rs232 consoles... Right now the Geode is the only thing close [1], unless I design my own board!

Gordon
[1] Yup - Some high-end Dells, and Asus motherboards support serial console, but also suck 10x the power I need them to suck and cost 5x as much )-:

Gordon

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