No real-world experience to contribute unfortunately. I was looking at the same ZBOX systems, very interesting. The GPUs have to be better than the NVIDIA proprietary nonsense I inadvertently subscribed to when I bought my Atom+ION2 machines as LTSP clients. ION2 accelerated 3D is a non-starter unless you maintain two chroots. Bummer.
In fact, I ended up swapping out a lot of the ION2 thin clients for older $40CDN Dell Pentium D small form factor (SFF) systems with low-profile ATI Radeon HD cards. They support compositing with no headaches on Ubuntu 10.04LTS. For the power consumption, yes, the Atom is great, but compared to a 5-year old Pentium D 3.06GHz at 1/6 the price point things begin to look silly in terms of value vs performance. And the Pentium D is even 64-bit! http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html Here the Pentium D scores 814 while the Atom D510 scores 656, by comparison the Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.40GHz in my laptop scores 1,407, and I consider it to be a very capable processor. In real life I've confirmed that the Pentium D "feels faster" even though the D510 is 2-core and 2-threads per core whereas the Pentium D is 2-core 1-thread per core. Another comparison: the venerable Core2 Quad Q6600 scores 2,984. It's 4x the power consumed (just for CPU), but mains power is cheap where I am (Quebec) and we need to heat the place in the winter! On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 9:39 PM, David Burgess <apt....@gmail.com> wrote: > > Has anybody done any playing with the AMD E-300/350/400 APUs? We've > been doing a lot of Atom systems lately (we like a decent CPU for > flash video), but the newer offerings from AMD, such as are featured > in the latest Zotac ZBOXes, have me curious. The CPU should be more > capable than the Atom, but I'm a little concerned about video > performance, as AMD GPUs have traditionally been buggy in Linux, and > custom-installing drivers and xorg files doesn't interest me; the > turn-key nature of the Atom boards has made me a little lazy I guess. > > In terms of power consumption too, I wouldn't want something hotter > than the Atom systems we have now, which tend to idle around 17W with > a PicoPSU. > > I'd be interested to hear about any experiences with these (or > something comparable from VIA, which I've not taken a serious look at > ever). > > db > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Write once. Port to many. > Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create > new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the > Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join > http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev > _____________________________________________________________________ > Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss > For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net -- Jay Goldberg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
