Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2054 from 2003/6/4
Quote:
HammerD wrote:
The Efika didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Cheap price, but also low performance and limited ram, slow IDE interface.
People want good pricing but they also want good performance.
SAM460 is good, if they can keep the cost reasonable without sacrificing performance.
Would be a nice replacement for aging PEG-2 machines, though.
The Sam 460 offers less than a Peg2 (no Altivec, less expandibility) and is on release in autumn more expensive than a Peg2 was many years ago. To me that doesn't fit into that category "good replacement".
A good replacement would be a 86x0 based ?ATX board. But unfortunately that isn't going to happen.
The Efika 5200B had a few weak points.
- too little RAM
- too slow ide (with flash storage this isn't too dramatic anymore for normal usage)
- not standrad form factor compatible
- need of an ATX PSU (an onboard 12V DC plug would have been much easier)
- no high speed usb
But direction of the Efika was good. The Efika2 would have made a nice device - if only the cache coherence wouldn't have been a show stopper for Linux. Today I think an e300/400MHZ core isn't enough, not even for low end. The Efika 5200B is just able to decode a TV stream - but only with a low bitrate. A bit more juice is required for a low end solution okay today.
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Whenever you're sad just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.
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