>>>>> "fan" == Fajar A Nugraha <fa...@fajar.net> writes: >>>>> "et" == Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@sun.com> writes:
fan> The N610N that I have (BCM3302, 300MHz, 64MB) isn't even
fan> powerful enough to saturate either the gigabit wired
I can't find that device. Did you misspell it or something? BCM
probably means Broadcom, and Broadcom is probably MIPS---it's TI
(omap) and Marvell (orion) that are selling arm.
Anyway I don't think saturating gigabit is the minimum acceptable
performance considering the external storage people actually use right
now.
That said, ARM is interesting because the chips just recently got a
lot faster at the same power/price point, like >1GHz. There are a
whole batch of new netbooks (i've been calling them HypeBooks because
they will probably fail) based on these new fast omap chips. Also the
next Orion stepping is supposed to have crypto accel which makes a big
difference in AES per watt. I will be trying ZFS crypto once it's
released, and my understanding from Linux dmcrypt users is, on
ordinary CPU's it's a serious bottleneck/powerhog. Right now it makes
more sense to me to do the crypto on Linux iSCSI targets, where I can
do it on hardware-accel Via C7 (also 32-bit), and put several C7 chips
into one zpool since they are device-granularity.
The 64MB may be a show-stopper for ZFS on the whole ARM platform
though. I brought it up because arm is a 32-bit platform.
et> a Sun 7110-style system shrunk down to a PCI-E controller -
et> you have a simple host-based control program, hook a disk (or
et> storage system) to the ARM HBA, and you could have a nice
et> little embedded ZFS system.
haha yeah! Oxford 911 firewire-to-?ATA bridges already have an ARM
core inside them.
If such a thing is ever made, I hope it's not sold by Sun so that I
can demand CDDL source. Otherwise it will probably be treated like
7000---people will be meant to buy the card to get access to a special
closed-source stable branch that has more bugfixes than sol10 but
fewer regressions than SXCE.
et> Either that, or if someone would figure out a way to have
et> multiple-chip ARM implementations (where they could spread out
et> the load efficiently).
yeah seriously though, this is a good chip. it's interesting in the
same way SPARC is interesting---gate count per throughput, watts per
throughput. The downside is that it doesn't have the stone-squeezing
high-end proprietary C compiler and fancy Java runtime with mature JIT
that Sun has for SPARC. The upside is the price point is orders of
magnitude off the T2000 which means it can seep into all kinds of
weird fun markets.
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