[9fans] 'cpu' is nice and fast.

[9fans] 'cpu' is nice and fast.

[ron minnich]

Now that I've got the 9 little epias up I can play -- well, actually, only
8 as the power brick for the 9th is on a box on its way to SC 2003 --
oops, mispacking ;-(

I'm finding that CPU'ing out a bunch of nodes in parallel is pleasantly
fast, much more so than the old Geodes. It is every bit as snappy as the
linux/bproc system we have on the other 10 EPIAs -- a pleasant surprise.

With the 10 second boot, the ability to cons up a new kernel and dump it
onto the compact flash to test, the ability to just boot a new Plan 9 from
a running Plan 9, the nice performance, and the Plan 9 environment, this
is a darned nice little parallel system. Really fun.

If you want to build one total cost of the ituner is ca. $400/node. You
can do much better than this but you give up the convenient compact flash
port and the display, but see:
http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/Desktop/837Spec.asp?Product.id=837&Cate.id=19

$219 including RAM.

I'm going to try to post some pictures to www.9grid.net tonight.

ron