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Great read. I wonder why the author didn't go with something like the three watt MK802 Linux mini-computer though?

I think the idea is he wants full processing power on demand while low power for the 90% of the time it's at idle.

ARM is great for idle but is still a fraction of desktop cpu computational power.

It's a couple years out of date but scroll down to the V8 and Sunspider benchmarks here:

http://vanshardware.com/2010/08/mirror-the-coming-war-arm-ve...

The new quad core ARM boxes are actually quite good. My own personal use case is different but as a Gentoo developer it's nice to see something like Firefox "only" take 3 hours to compile. Which is really good when trying to debug issues because an mx51 it takes 18-20 hours.

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