Jerry McBride <mcbrides9@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> These sbc's are beautiful. But why-oh-why so expensive? If one of these
> manufacturers would bring out an sbc with decent features and a sub $50.00
> price tag, they would take the market by storm...
>
> I can only dream... Imagine a 20 node cluster of 1Ghz sbc's... and costing
> less than $1000.00...
Its all about economies of scale. If a platform becomes popular
enough, you might get your wish. PC104 could fit the bill. Its a
great embedded architecture that has been around for years. Instead
of a standard backplane type bus, you build up mini-component boards
in a stack to make computing blocks. CPU modules can be found as
cheap as $100, though you will pay a bit more as it cross the 1GHz
threshold. CPU modules often come with video, keyboard, mouse, even
ethernet and RAM built in. A variety of optional I/O modules are
also available from a variety of vendors. They usually run low
power, cool, and fanless. Linux already runs on most of these things,
so yeah, you could build a really small, quiet cluster out of these
things (if the price were right).
Thad
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