$35 LAN Party...

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Colin McGregor <colin.mc151-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Lennart Sorensen
> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 08:47:23PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
>>> Just get yourself any reasonable netbook and you've got all that in a
>>> package you can flip open with far less hassle than plugging together
>>> a bunch of components.  Juggling a Pi with all that just isn't viable.
>>>
>>> Granted, being able to go somewhere up north with a nice big flatscreen
>>> and a Model M keyboard and be able to fit everything else you need to
>>> do some coding in your back pocket could still be a Pi application.
>>> But if you're hauling a pile of stuff then a bigger computer works too.
>>>
>>> The Pi shines mostly for being cheap and tiny and having GPIO pins.
>>>
>>> Note also that the latest Intel thing about them getting out of the
>>> traditional desktop-board racket is not because desktops are dead, but
>>> rather that the ATX form factor is a huge waste of real estate: Intel can
>>> do all it wants to do for a high-end machine on a four-inch-square board
>>> nowadays.  And that's only about double the size of a Pi.
>>
>> The memory and cpu sockets alone take more than that on a high end intel.
>> 8 DDR3 slots and a 2011 pin cpu socket takes some space.  And of course
>> any high end machine would want at least one PCIe x16 slot for a video
>> card (since that is something intel certainly doesn't know how to do yet).
>>
>> But certainly 7 expansion slots are hadly ever needed except by those
>> people that seem to think 3 or 4 video cards working together is required.
>
> Well, there still are a range of people who want/need to do massive
> amounts of IO (not just video out). Obviously there are other
> examples, but the first one that come to my mind is extreme MythTV
> people who want to be able to record from EVERYTHING (cable TV, OTA,
> and satellite), For the extreme MythTV people 7 expansion slots could
> be used up very quickly.

Sure, but this purpose deviates heavily from what Intel would have in mind
in terms of the "4 inch square board" notion.  A MythTV recording box isn't
much like that

There are a number of scenarios where computers should be physically
fairly large, and this tends to relate to scenarios involving heavy I/O:

a) Database servers want to have a lot of disk and connectivlity, and
hence, quite commonly, multiple RAID controllers and NICs.

b) A MythTV box needs multiple recording cards.

c) A machine devoted to disk storage needs many RAID controllers

d) A network controller (which covers a number of cases, firewalls,
packet shapers) needs a whole bunch of NICs, and possibly
crypto accelerator cards

These have some diversity of purpose, but they all imply that there is
an ongoing need for "tower/server" boxes with a bunch of slots for
things supplementary to what's on a typical motherboard.

And this does nothing to prevent Intel from discovering that there is
considerable value in selling Many Many Many desktop-oriented
systems that didn't need the extra controllers and which can fit
into a few square inches of board area, and, correspondingly, into
a pretty tiny number of cubic inches of case space.  I'd think this
eminently true for typical office desktops.

Raspberry Pi may be a *bit* on the wimpy side for such, but
something powerful enough to run Office 2013, um, wait a
moment, yes, that probably requires sufficiently entropy-bending
amounts of RAM and CPU that, hey, "My hair is a bird, your
argument is invalid!"  Sorry about that...
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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