On Thu, 18 May 2017 22:02:03 -0400 Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:

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a couple of things i forgot to mention, one is to emphasise the "bang-per-buck" part. [...] this kind of design assessment trick i've only ever heard being used by people who make beowulf clusters, the word "cluster" being the key word.

Those are fun problems to solve. You're right that there are a lot of variables, and many different approaches. And if you've got a few important criteria like cost or time, it's easy enough to weed out the bad ones.

Speaking of Beowulf clusters .. Not to go too far off topic, but has anyone given any thought to a Beowulf cluster of EOMA68's? I only ask because if Intel and AMD are including so much proprietary crap between you and the processor, it's only a matter of time before other alternatives become important. The way I see it, the current Allwinner based EOMA68's are great for doing what a tablet or netbook can do, but it's not going to replace my workstation with 16GB of RAM (which I run out of probably weekly before needing to restart, but that's another story .. Windows and Chrome, I have no one to blame but myself there). Anyway, assuming that the Linux kernel could scale to maybe 8-16 of these little cores, and being that they're all upgradeable, it actually seems like it could become a neat alternative for workstation usage. I don't even see where cost would be that prohibitive, as workstations actually get pretty expensive often surpassing $1000 USD. Are there any hard realities that would prevent the EOMA68 from working in this fashion? Any bandwidth issues or technical limitations?

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I was just researching browser memory usage for myself. The best one is opera, which is rather shocking (chromium does not open all the files, this seems to be due to an internal load limiter or timeout.): 482 local html pages with JS disabled: Opera 12 1024MiB Chromium ~2000MiB

The story gets worse with FF, way worse (and the time it takes FF to render, OMG!)

David