XO-2 software plans

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 23.05.2008, at 04:54, Jim Gettys wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 19:28 -0400, Andres Salomon wrote:
>
>> If they put me in charge, I'd choose whichever CPU had the best
>> performance, lowest power consumption, and lowest price - regardless
>> of architecture.
>
> Change the ordering: power consumption and price (closely related to
> integration these days), then performance.  FP required...  That's  
> what
> drove us to the Geode.  FP is essential for Linux software to "just
> work": I lived on the StrongARM with the iPAQ, and (almost) all free
> software signal processing code (e.g. all multimedia code) is written
> presuming a floating point unit.  At the time, there were many chips
> whose spec sheet claimed you could get FP, but when you went to the
> vendor, the FP unit didn't exist.  It's now 3 years later, so we  
> have a
> number of highly integrated chips with FP units that are pretty low
> power to choose from.
>
> Note that power consumption drives price through the entire chain;  
> what
> kind/size of power generation you need, etc.

/me wants a graphics accelerator.

- Bert -