From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4c696dd9a639aeba62d4d157e1f835e2@hamnavoe.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port From: Richard Miller In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 11:22:58 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 12b39318-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > yeah, that is the "PPC problem". They're always about 10x over on > price/performance. You can get for ca. $150 today a 1 GHZ VIA C3 mobo -- > much nicer. I agree that the single-quantity price for the ipengine-1 is very high, but you're not comparing like with like. The ipengine isn't meant to be a generic desktop PC motherboard. It's the size of a credit card, has an integrated FPGA and lots of programmable I/O pins, and comes with reasonably good hardware docs including schematics .. all useful for designing / prototyping a special-purpose embedded system. Also the one-off price includes case and power supply, so it's usable as a complete (fanless, diskless - i.e. dead silent) computer, if your application fits in the 4MB onboard flash. If Plan 9 is a bit of a tight squeeze, you can get Inferno from Vita Nuova (which served as a useful reference for the original Plan 9 ipengine implementation - thanks, Charles!). Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are? -- Richard