OT: Where do I find...

A large tablet PC with the touchscreen turned off in the setup?

What one client used (but they needed a little smaller than notebook, more like a netbook) was a netbook where the screen swiveled and could be flipped completely over. Meaning it came to rest and could be clicked in place on the "underside" of the netbook. Then the whole thing was fastened to the machine. That way nobody could mess with keyboard or pointing device because those were now facing the steel panel of the machine.

I want four of them on a KVMP switch ;-)

The Unicorn SBC should work. We want them for web servers.

Take a look at nettop computers, usually set up to be media center computers...

Charlie

Any x86 SBC would do, with or without enclosures. We want a bunch of them sharing a single power supply and booting off flash drives. They would NFS to a big hard drive for main storage. I have a Core 2 Duo netbook to build the image, than load them on the flash drives. That's why i am looking into Core 2 Duo SBC. Core 2 is good enough for now. Haswell will blow ARM out of the water.. Flame started...

I prefer to keep one set of binary for all PCs and servers. Just don't want to bother with porting to ARM.

Looks promising: 16 ARM cores at 2+ GHz.

Yes, AMD/ARM serve its purpose to keep Intel arrogance in check. Intel could have low power x86 decades ago. Without ARM, it probably would never happen. But now, we are close to having Haswell. It would make life much easier with single binary on Linux PC and servers.

Intel has tried three times, that I know of, to invent an architecture to replace x86, all failures. x86 was barbaric 20 years ago, and Intel must know it. I don't understand why Intel gave up their ARM license; that was probably a political decision.

Intel's real strengths are semiconductor process and ruthlessness. They are starting to accept foundry business to capitalize on the process part.

AMD has good processes, too. AMD+ARM will be fun to watch.

People like Amazon and Google could roll their own ARM server chips; maybe they are already.

Yes, ARM is part of the reason to go low power with the x86 chips. But the real reason is that they have run out of steam in terms of getting higher performance. First they had so many transistors available that they just couldn't come up with productive ways of speeding up a processor with more hardware anymore, so they started adding more CPUs. However, once you get to 4 CPUs it is hard to get a wide enough pipe to memory.

Now the only thing left is to try to reduce power consumption for a given level of performance. Yes, they needed to do this 10 years ago, but the drive then was still for higher performance desktop and notebooks. Now they are motivated by the battery powered, hand held market. But even if ARM wasn't eating their lunch, they would be going this way just because that is where most of the CPU chips will be sold in the future.

What was that line in the "Untouchables"? Something about bringing a knife to a gun fight... even Intel can figure out how to make guns from the x86.

What? The last time I checked, AMD was a full process generation behind Intel with no prospect of catching up. The investment is just too huge. They were on the verge of going under when they won the European law suit and Intel handed them 1.2 Billion USD. They had sold off a bunch of fabs to remain liquid and ended up losing their interest in them altogether.

AMD is a hurting pup. Intel can't afford to see them go however... or at least in the old days Intel needed them to pretend to be competition. But now with the ARM doing well I guess AMD is dispensable. Is AMD maintaining market share at 18% these days? I haven't looked in a while.

Intel had leakage problems in their transistors as they shrunk the dies. And still do. Thatswhy they added cores and threads after pentimum. 3.5GHz speeds will be the norm until they can find a fix.

Cheers

That's semiconductor physics, not competitive pressure. Everyone has the same problem. The speed isn't limited just because of the thermal load. The parts can't run faster because the transistors aren't significantly faster when you keep dropping the voltage. What is Vdd down to now, 0.8 volts, less?

Faster CPU won't help, when other chips can't really catch up to it. Until they have on-chip DRAM, even high core count doesn't mean much.

I think AMD is going, or is already, fabless, working with TSMC.

Intel and Microsoft did all they could to sandbag AMD. But Intel wound up copying AMD's x86/64 architecture.

AMD+ARM makes sense. They know how to put systems on chips. I hope they prosper.

The scary part, for Intel, is that the price per CPU chip is plummeting. The cost per MIP keeps coming down, tablets don't need a lot of MIPS, and nobody is going to put a $700 CPU into a $200 tablet.

I sort of like my huge HP box, but it's a dinosaur. Most people don't want boxes, cables, monitors, keyboards, mice, power strips, USB and Ethernet hubs, that mess of hardware and software that a PC is.

is

Tablets are non-computers. We keep trying to make control consoles out of them and keep hitting stupidities.

You can't *DO* anything with a tablet.

I expect there'll always be a desktop available. You can always make one out of parts, and gamers will keep the parts business alive.

You can /consume/ using a tablet, and that's the way the vast majority of consumers (ho ho) use the net.

Tablets are, of course, "suboptimal" for /originating/ content.

Yes, but cost may be an issue. In the 90s the rule-of-thumb was that the computer you wanted (and could afford) at home cost £1500. After the web became widely used that cost dropped significantly, and the equivalent mid-range machine is now £300-£400. Economies of scale matter.

I stand corrected. :)

Suboptimal ... with extreme prejudice.

May well be. Two years on, the outfit that made the machine i am typing on now no longer makes anything like it.

Yessir - Machrone's Law if you had a Byte subscription.

It happened between 2000 and 2005. How that plays out remains to be seen.

I should have noted that I was using "suboptimal" in the engineering sense: as a synonym for "lousy" :)