[GTALUG] How to go fast without speculating... maybe

[Christopher Browne]

On 30 January 2018 at 18:04, David Collier-Brown via talk
<talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> On 29/01/18 09:32 PM, William Park via talk wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 09:17:20PM -0500, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
>>>
>>> My benchmark for processor success is: Does several of
>>> Asus,Supermicro,Tyan,Gigabyte et al make a motherboard for this CPU.
>>
>> I second this.  If I can't buy it, then I don't care.  This is true for
>> cars and computer.
>
>
> Ditto: Unobtanium isn't very useful (;-))
>
> The sparc laptop I used to have was deliberately designed to fit on a board
> that was identical to a Dell product. When the screen died it was swapped
> for a Dell part. Ditto the battery, when it got wimpy.

I recalling seeing the SPARC and Alpha laptops at conferences; while that
was pretty cool, they were ultra-pricey, and yes, indeed, pretty much
"unobtanium."

I was pretty happy when I found I could buy a Chrome laptop running ARM;
I have never done a full switch over running "full blown Linux on it";
it remains
as a Chromebook installation, albeit with Crouton on top (which is
very likable).

I'm not aware of a MIPS-based laptop (which isn't a proof of nonexistence); it
was a nice second-best that there are plenty of routers running MIPS.  I wish
that the Cavium MIPS/Octeon had gotten more deployed; being able to have
a server with a bunch of them aboard would be pretty useful.

A desktop is nice; so also are servers...

-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"