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Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

IO performance on these CPUs is fairly poor, so gigabit is unlikely to actually be worthwhile.

On my TS-7800 [1] which has GigE and a 500MHz (!) CPU, Samba outperforms the Raspberry Pi (15MB/s vs 7MB/s). Note that on the RPi not even the whole 100Mb link is utilized despite the CPU being slightly faster in general (yes, I did some benchmarks) - and the CPU on the TS-7800 was actually designed for storage applications. So there may be something on to your claim, and it would appear that CPUs that include graphics and stuff are not that good at I/O.

[1] http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product...

...it would appear that CPUs that include graphics and stuff are not that good at I/O.

I made the same observation on my blog[0]. It's a shame that decent I/O and fast CPUs/GPUs are rarely if ever combined in ARM systems. What good is a quad core CPU if you can't get any data to it?

[0] http://nitrogen.posterous.com/the-ideal-arm-platform

You may already know this, but the Ethernet controller on the Pi is actually a USB device, built into the LAN9512 [0] USB controller/hub.

The TS-7800 has a dedicated Ethernet controller, which presumably explains some of the difference.

[0] http://www.smsc.com/index.php?tid=300&pid=135

That page says "Quantity 100 starts at $229." Does that mean one board is $2.29?

No, it means the price is $229 each if you order at least 100. Without the quantity discount, it's $269 each.

I don't think so. Bulk pricing usually lists the per unit price. The quantity is denoted since you can get better pricing for larger quantity orders. For example, I may get a microcontroller for $4 when I order 10k, but you'd pay $25 if you just ordered one from DigiKey.

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