On May 10, 2012, at 1:34 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:

> On 5/10/12, Pavel Krivanek <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> one my friend got Raspberry Pi yesterday so I have seen it in action.
>> I had almost no time for experiments but I have seen Fedora 17 on it
>> with standard Squeak (3.10) packages for this distro on FullHD
>> display. On that VM (3.10.5) I got about 40M bytecodes/sec and 1M
>> sends/sec. The environment is not extra fast but usable without
>> problems. I will pray for successful GSoC ARM JIT project :-) The
>> device was connected to the professional meter and the power
>> consumption was about 3.5W.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> -- Pavel
>> 
>> 
> 
> Amazing, a 256MB RAM machine with a main board which includes
> everything for 35USD.
> Some five to seven years ago one would not have believed that this is 
> possible.


This especially *screams* for re-considering certain design decisions that we
inherited from Smalltalk.

256MB of RAM makes it hard to argue for complex schmemes to save some a little 
ram.
(Compact classes, for example).

How would smalltalk look like if it would be re-designed with the same 
philosophy that they
used when there where just 256Kb in the Alto? 

This is a fun comparision:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

1) Price. 

$35 vs. $35000 (est, not adjusted for inflation).   x1000

2) RAM

256MB vs. 256Kb (max was 512, at the end).   x1000

3) CPU

1MIPS?  not sure.  Vs.  700Mhz ARMv11         x 1000 (?)
                                       + 3D and MP4 decoder   

So one could argue that it's a factor of 1 Million considering price
and Performance together...


        Marcus


--
Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de


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