Glenn A. Thompson wrote:
Just for my own knowledge, what's the big deal with boards like the Soekris and WRAP?
The price doesn't seem that great to me for what you get in terms of power. Is it power consumption? Size?
They seem like a lot of trouble vs boards like the VIA mini-itx or now the VIA nano-itx.
Just trying to understand their real value.
I can only speak for myself, of course, but the reasons I like my Soekris boxes very much are: * they're small. Especially nice when such a box is in one's living-room, and not in some data-center * they're quiet. No fans or harddrives that make annoying noise. Again, no big deal in a data-center, but very nice in one's living-room * no need for a monitor or keyboard - all one needs to set these things up is the box itself, a null-modem cable and a laptop * they consume very little power (so they can be battery-powered if one wants to) * 3 network interfaces, which should be enough for most uses
The only down-side is (as you mentioned) the CPU power. But the only case where I've needed more CPU power than available on a soekris box was when I wanted to run a VPN tunnel over higher speed nets (like wifi or a LAN). For "normal" internet speeds (up to 3MBit or so - that's only an estimate, extrapolated from the CPU usage I see when I run OpenVPN on my DSL line) even the slow ElanSC520 is sufficient.
Regarding the "trouble" they cause (again, I only have experience with
soekris) - I can't say that they cause _any_ trouble, if one knows what
to do. The Elan chip has a problem with time keeping, which can be fixed
by using a kernel built for Elan. Getting the inital setup onto the CF
can be difficult when one does it for the first time, but since the
soekris supports PXE booting, it's actually less hassle (especially if
one has a setup like pxeinstall available at http://leaf.sourceforge.net/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=10&page_id=3 ) than messing with floppies, or CD burners or USB CF readers.
As far as the price goes - the small Soekris goes for $185 (including
case and power supply), the WRAP with 3 nics is $147 (without a case, I think).
The VIA Epia boards I just found on the net (I didn't search much) started around $140 for the bare board, plus RAM, plus a case. So, even if one shops around a little more and finds better deals, I wouldn't say they have a huge price advantage - and one gets a load of stuff one doesn't need (my router needs neither 5.1 audio nor TV-out), and lacks some other stuff I'd need (like extra nics).
I wouldn't want to run my PVR on a soekris - for such usage, the Epia
boards look much more promising. But for a router, the soekris (or the
PC-Engines boxes - I'm not trying to sell soekris to anybody - it's just
what I use) are ideal. And over "real" embedded boards (with an ARM processor or so), they have the advantage that they're still compatible to mainstream i386 processors.
Martin
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